Can reforming global institutions help developing countries share more in the benefits from globalization?
Globalization could significantly expand trade, international investment, and technological advances, but the gains from global integration have been unevenly distributed across and within nations. Greater global interdependence has also brought greater macroeconomic volatility, resulting in several serious financial crises in the second half of the 1990s. The global matrix of Bretton Woods and United Nations institutions that developed starting in the 1940s, formed under a different balance of power, in a world of fixed exchange rates and limited capital mobility. Since the 1960s regional financial institutions have emerged because of the greater autonomy of different regions and the greater financial needs of development. The author reviews different proposals for reform of the international financial institutions and changes in the roles of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. He highlights the implications for developing countries of (1) Policy conditionality. (2) The countercyclical role of multilaterals'lending. (3) Greater lending to middle-income than to low-income developing countries. (3) Access to liquidity at times of crisis. (4) Mechanisms for giving low-income countries a greater voice in IMF and World Bank decisionmaking. The author streses the overlapping responsibilities of the Bretton Woods and regional financial institutions and the need to reassess the allocation of responsibilities and to develop better coordination mechanisms between these institutions. Those designing institutional reform must consider the corporate capabilities of each type of institution. The corporate cultures of global and regional institutions differ. So does the kind of knowledge they generate and disseminate, and so do patterns of interactions with, and mechanisms for representation of, client countries.Finally, the author calls attention to the need to harmonize national and global growth-oriented policies in a way that reduces volatility and promotes social equity.
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
| Length: | |
| Date of creation: | 31 Jan 2001 |
| Date of revision: | |
| Handle: | RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:2518 |
| Contact details of provider: | Postal: 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433 Phone: (202) 477-1234 Web page: http://www.worldbank.org/ Email: More information through EDIRC
|
References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
- Robert A. Mundell, 2000.
"A Reconsideration of the Twentieth Century,"
American Economic Review,
American Economic Association, vol. 90(3), pages 327-340, June.
- Mundell, Robert A., 1999. "A Reconsideration of the Twentieth Century," Nobel Prize in Economics documents 1999-5, Nobel Prize Committee.
- Prebisch, Raúl, 1950. "The economic development of Latin America and its principal problems," Sede de la CEPAL en Santiago (Estudios e Investigaciones) 29973, Naciones Unidas Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe (CEPAL).
- Bacha, Edmar L., 1978. "An interpretation of unequal exchange from Prebisch-Singer to Emmanuel," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 5(4), pages 319-330, December.
- Stanley Fischer, 1999. "On the Need for an International Lender of Last Resort," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 13(4), pages 85-104, Fall.
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:2518. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Roula I. Yazigi)
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.