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...

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...

The East Asian crisis of 1997 sparked an extensive literature in an effort to explain the causes and spread of heightened foreign exchange (FX) market pressures in the region. In this paper we model FX movements and calculate spillover effects covering the extended period between 1990 and 2004....

The report examines both statistically and analytically various aspects of commercial bank provisioning. In the first phase, the report defines the differences existing between countries and explains the implications of provisioning for banks'balance sheets. Secondly, it looks at the various...

Recent attempts to explain the implementation of conditionality incorporated in IMF-supported programmes have used the concept of ‘ownership’. A literature on ownership has begun to emerge and, alongside this, policy changes in the form of streamlining conditionality and broadening...