This paper examines the relationship between currency internationalisation and economic structure. It argues that the hierarchical and asymmetric architecture of the international monetary system imposes a "survival constraint" upon non-centre countries that obliges them to generate net inflows...

Following an analysis of the forces behind the global capital flows paradoxʺ observed in the era of advancing financial globalization, this paper sets out to investigate the opportunity costs of self-insurance through precautionary reserve holdings. We reject the idea of reserves as low-cost...

It has taken two crises - the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998 and the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 - for the international community to seriously focus on the reform of the international financial architecture for crisis prevention, management and resolution. Facing the global...

An environment for the activities of the International Monetary Fund (the IMF) has fundamentally changed over the two recent decades. The strong development of financial innovations as well as of financial globalisation was among major forces driving the change and shaping the economic growth...

This paper proposes a comprehensive yet evolutionary reform of the global monetary non-system that evolved out of the breakdown of the original Bretton Woods arrangement in the early 1970s. It includes: (i) a global reserve system that mixes the multi-currency arrangement with an active use of...

The more severe a financial crisis, the greater has been the likelihood of its management under an IMF-supported programme and the shorter the time from crisis onset to programme initiation. Political links to the United States have increased programme likelihood but have prompted faster...

This paper analyses three major problems of the current international monetary system: the asymmetric-adjustment problem, dependence on the monetary policy of the main reserveissuing country, and the large demand for self-insurance by developing countries. It then proposes two reform routes:...