The international financial system has made a major, direct and sustained contribution to global poverty for the past 30 years. It has worsened it. It has done so in two main ways. First, the analytical framework and perspective the International Monetary Fund has brought to its role in...

The International Monetary Fund was primarily established to facilitate the management of a fixed exchange rate regime designed to promote global trade. It did this in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a good idea for its time. That time ended with the floating of exchange rates in the 1970s. Since...

This paper examines the role of IMF-supported programs in crisis prevention; specifically, whether, conditional on an episode of intense market pressures, IMF financial support helps prevent a capital account crisis from developing and, if so, through what channels. In doing so, the paper...

Alexander Swoboda is one of the originators of the bipolar view that capital mobility creates pressure for countries to abandon intermediate exchange rate arrangements in favor of greater flexibility and harder pegs. This paper takes another look at the evidence for this hypothesis using two...

From the inception of International Monetary System (I.M.S.) the system has been facing liquidity problem. Starting with the gold standard, the limited stock of gold could not cope with the increasing world trade. The introduction of the gold-exchange standard which included some key currencies...

This chapter examines in a systematic way how different forms of regional monetary cooperation may contribute to reducing macroeconomic volatility and buffer exogenous shocks for developing countries and emerging markets. It divides mechanisms into three categories of regional financial and...