Key Features:Gives comprehensive treatment covering trade, finance, macroeconomics and development policyCombines the perspectives of leading analysts from North America, Europe and AsiaContains accessible technical.

At the close of the Second World War, when industrialized nations faced serious trade and financial imbalances, delegates from forty-four countries met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in order to reconstruct the international monetary system. In this volume, three generations of scholars and...

Recent crises in emerging markets have been heavily driven by balance-sheet or net-worth effects. Episodes in countries as far-flung as Indonesia and Argentina have shown that exchange rate adjustments that would normally help to restore balance can be destabilizing, even catastrophic, for...

Intro -- Contents -- 1. Introduction / Barry Eichengreen and Jeffry Frieden -- Part 1: Economic and Monetary Union -- 2. The Transition to Economic and Monetary Union / Geoffrey Garrett -- 3. The Political Economy of French Economic Policy in the Perspective of EMU / Christian de Boissieu and...

A Brookings Institution Press and Asian Development Bank Institute publication Meet the next global currency: the Chinese renminbi, or the "redback." Following the global financial crisis of 2008, China's major monetary policy objective is the internationalization of the renminbi, that is, to...

After moving slowly downward for the better part of four decades, central bank gold holdings have risen since the Global Financial Crisis. We identify 14 "active diversifiers," defined as countries that purchased gold and raised its share in total reserves by at least 5 percentage points over...

Along with its painful economic costs, the financial crisis of 2008 raised concerns over the future of international policy making. As in recessions past, new policy initiatives emerged, approaches that placed greater importance on protecting national interests than promoting international...

Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity....

It is rare for countries to give up their currencies and thus their ability to influence such critical aspects of their economies as interest and exchange rates. Yet ten years ago a number of European countries did exactly that when they adopted the euro. Despite some dissent, there were a...