Especially with the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, Asian countries have advocated a profound reform of the international financial architecture. Their proposals focused on two main axes: a reform of the global financial system and stronger regional monetary integration in Asia. There are...

Alexandre Lamfalussy has been highly influential in the process of European monetary and financial unification. In this paper we will analyse the work of the "Young Lamfalussy" (from the mid 1950s to the mid 1960s). Lamfalussy started his career as an academic, focusing on growth theory and...

The Latin American debt crisis, which broke out in August 1982, was the first global financial crisis in the postwar period. While the crisis started in the "periphery", it constituted a threat to the "core" of the world economy, as the banking system was under severe pressure. Alongside the...

Robert Triffin became famous with his trenchant analyses of the vulnerabilities of the Bretton Woods system. These are still at the center of many discussions today. This paper argues that there is a remarkable continuity in Triffin's work. From his earliest writings, Triffin developed a vision...

"A century of macroeconomic and monetary thought at the National Bank of Belgium" traces the history of economic research at the National Bank of Belgium, from the early decades of the 20th century to its present functioning in the Eurosystem. The study also goes into the major economic policy...

In this paper I outline - from a practitioner's as well as from a researcher's perspective - several of the key developments that took place during the last century in monetary policy. In particular, I describe how the monetary system evolved from gold standard, prevailing throughout most of the...

Among the international policy institutions, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is known for its sensitivity to financial stability issues. Attention to the "macro-prudential" dimension of financial stability is very typical for the BIS. The Bank's macro-prudential approach first came...

Niels Thygesen (born 1934) played for nearly five decades an influential role in the process of economic and monetary integration in Europe. He is especially known as a member of the Delors Committee and as the first Chair of the European Fiscal Board. As part of a research program on collecting...

Jacques van Ypersele de Strihou is a discrete person but well-known in Belgian and international political and economic circles. After an outstanding academic career at the Universities of Namur, Leuven and Louvain and then at Yale in the United States where he gained a PhD, he started out his...