Recently the Interim Committee of the International Monetary Fund met in Hamburg without making significant progress on the proposal for a substitution account. One of the main initiatives toward restructuring the international monetary system thus was postponed if not indefinitely suspended....

The IMF's Interim Committee recently for the first time discussed the creation of a “Substitution Account” to convert certain amounts of excess reserve currencies into SDRs. This issue is likely to be on the agenda of the next annual meeting of the IMF in the fall of this year. Prof....

Although regional development banking is a recent institution in the field of international cooperation, the author asks the question whether in the light of current and possible events in the 1970s its fundamental policies are appropriate to those developments in particular, and to economic...

When the Bretton Woods system collapsed in December 1971 the expectation was that a reformed monetary system could be introduced within a year or two. The following article discusses the question why, contrary to this general expectation, the international instability in payments still exists...

This paper highlights that the EMU transition process itself can pose challenges to individual accession countries and draws policy implications for ERM II. Differences in financial market development and international liabilities underscore the risks and benefits of ERM II, and may lead to...

After almost four decades of price stability, inflation has recently approached historical highs. Initially driven by global energy and food price increases, the magnitude of the surge in inflation caught central banks and markets by surprise. Price pressures are now increasingly broadening to...