From being widely seen in early 2008 as an institution in decline and irrelevant to many of the problems then facing the world economy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has more recently been presented as an international financial institution that is of essential importance in the...

The IMF advertises itself as playing a catalytic role, whereby its lending programmes induce other providers of finance to invest or lend as well. The theoretical foundations of this claim are reviewed and found to be questionable. The empirical evidence also appears to contradict the notion of...

The dilemma facing policymakers is how to combine the instruments they have available in the form of fiscal, monetary and exchange rate policy to achieve the targets of internal and external balance. Shortly before the global economic and financial crisis in 2008 most economies appeared to be...

As it has for many years, International Monetary Fund conditionality is currently receiving much attention in the context of the global financial crisis. At the beginning of the 2000s the Fund introduced a policy of ‘streamlining’ intended to reduce the amount of conditionality and...

From a situation as late as 2008, when they were largely unfashionable, special drawing rights (SDR s) have become the centre of attention in discussions about a reformed international monetary system. The G20 and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have backed a significant additional...

The financial and economic crisis in Greece in 2009/2010 has reawakened interest in the future of the euro and the eurozone. After briefly explaining its sources, this article focuses on the longer-term issues to which the crisis gives rise. It explores the underlying weaknesses of current...

The world currently faces a number of economic problems. These include the large global economic imbalances that may prove to be unsustainable; international poverty, where projections suggest that it is unlikely that the Millennium Development Goals will be achieved; and stalled multilateral trade...

At the beginning of the 1990s it appeared that there was considerable agreement about the kind of economic policies that countries turning to the IMF and the World Bank should pursue. These included macroeconomic stabilisation, microeconomic liberalisation and openness, and were summarised by...