The worldwide rise of sovereign wealth funds is emblematic of the ongoing transformation of nation-state economic prospects. "Sovereign Wealth Funds" maps the global footprints of these financial institutions, examining their governance and investment management, and issues of domestic and international legitimacy. Through a variety of case studies--from the China Investment Corporation to the funds of several Gulf states--the authors show that the forces propelling the adoption and development of sovereign wealth funds vary by country. The authors also show that many of these investment institutions have identifiable commonalities of form and function that match the core institutions of Western financial markets.

The authors suggest that the international legitimacy of sovereign wealth funds is based on the degree to which their design and governance match Western expectations about investment management. Undercutting commonplace assumptions about the emerging world of the twenty-first century, the authors demonstrate that even small countries with large and globally oriented sovereign wealth funds are likely to play a significant role in international relations.

"Sovereign Wealth Funds" considers how such financial organizations have altered not only the face of finance, but also the international geopolitical landscape.

The rise of Asia, and China specifically, is the single most important force reshaping the world economy at the beginning of the 21st century. From a low of 20 per cent in 1950, Asia's share of global GDP has now risen to 33 per cent and will exceed 40 per cent within a generation if current forecasts are realized. Asia's growing weight in the world economy is elevating it to a central position in global economic and financial affairs. The potential global impact of this astonishing growth is far reaching, from oil markets and the environment to a reshaping of trade relations in the current multilateral system dominated by the WTO.
This collection of original essays written by leading economists explores the likely impact of the rapid growth in the East Asian economies, and in particular China, on the world economy in the coming decades and the consequent challenges for the development of trade, macroeconomic, and environmental policy.

The frequency and virulence of recent financial crises have led to calls for reform of the current international financial architecture. In an effort to learn more about today's international financial environment, the authors turn to an earlier era of financial globalization between 1870 and 1913. By examining data on sovereign bonds issued by borrowing developing countries in this earlier period and in the present day, the authors are able to identify the characteristics of successful borrowers in the two periods. They are then able to show that global crises or contagion are a feature of the 1990s which was hardly known in the previous era of globalization. Finally, the authors draw lessons for today from archival data on mechanisms used by British investors in the 19th century to address sovereign defaults. Using new qualitative and quantitative data, the authors skillfully apply a variety of approaches in order to better understand how problems of volatility and debt crises are dealt with in international financial markets.

Understanding macroeconomic developments and policies in the twenty-first century is daunting: policy-makers face the combined challenges of supporting economic activity and employment, keeping inflation low and risks of financial crises at bay, and navigating the ever-tighter linkages of globalization. Many professionals face demands to evaluate the implications of developments and policies for their business, financial, or public policy decisions. Macroeconomics for Professionals provides a concise, rigorous, yet intuitive framework for assessing a country's macroeconomic outlook and policies. Drawing on years of experience at the International Monetary Fund, Leslie Lipschitz and Susan Schadler have created an operating manual for professional applied economists and all those required to evaluate economic analysis.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is in eclipse as the preeminent institution promoting international economic and financial stability. Successful reform of the IMF must engage the full spectrum of its members. The IMF should not focus primarily on its low-income members and the challenges of global poverty nor should it focus exclusively on international financial crises affecting a small group of vulnerable emerging-market economies. Instead, it must be engaged with each of its members potentially on the full range of their economic and financial policies and play a central role in shaping global economic performance. This important new book strongly argues that systemically important countries, starting with the Group of Seven, must support the IMF in this role. Its recommendations cover all key aspects of IMF responsibilities and operations: (1) In the crucial area of governance, the membership of the IMF should promptly address the reallocation of IMF shares (voting power) and the reallocation of chairs (representation on the IMF executive board), and it is time to discard the old conventions and to adopt a merit-based approach to the choice of the IMF's leadership; (2) mechanisms should be put in place to increase the IMF's leverage over systemically important members, and the IMF must act more forcefully in discharging its responsibility to exercise firm surveillance over members? exchange rate policies; (3) the Fund's central role in external financial crises should be reaffirmed; (4) the IMF should narrow and refocus its involvement with its low-income members; (5) the IMF's activities should be updated with respect to members? capital account policies and financialsectors; and (6) the IMF should put in place procedures for borrowing from the market to guard against the possibility that it will not receive timely increases in its quota resources.

This book reviews the state-of-the-art of the literature on international financial contagion. The individual contributions bridge the gap between econometric theory and evidence, while the comprehensive range of financial market and country regions under consideration highlights the future challenges facing econometricians, international policymakers, and financial practitioners.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's new open access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. We understand very little about the billions of dollars that flow throughout the world from migrants back to their home countries. In this rigorous and illuminating work, Matt Bakker, an economic sociologist, examines how these migrant remittances-the resources of some of the world's least affluent people-have come to be seen in recent years as a fundamental contributor to development in the migrant-sending states of the Global South. This book analyzes how the connection between remittances and development was forged through the concrete political and intellectual practices of policy entrepreneurs within a variety of institutional settings, from national government agencies and international development organizations to nongovernmental policy foundations and think tanks.

In order to understand international economic regulations, it is essential to understand the variation in competing corporations' interests. This book's theoretical findings open a 'black box' in the literature on international political economy and elucidate a source of regulatory differences and similarities. Its counter-intuitive case studies reveal how business and governments actually interact.

By exploring powerful corporations' investment profiles and regulatory strategies, this book explains why globalization sometimes results in a 'race to the bottom', sometimes in higher common regulations, and sometimes in regulations that differ between countries. Uniquely, it then explains which regulatory outcome is likely to occur under specified conditions. The explanation incorporates economics, political science, studies of regulatory capture, and examinations of transaction costs, firms' regulatory strategies, and the roles international institutions.

This book explains the demographic and funding crises that threaten continental European systems of pension and retirement income. Based upon examination of pension provision in France, Germany, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, the book argues that state-sponsored social security will not deliver promised retirement incomes for the baby-boom generation. The author considers the future of pensions and in particular the prospects for a pan-European approach to retirement income provision.

This fascinating book presents a lively discussion of key issues resulting from the recent financial crisis. The expert contributors explore why the global financial crisis occurred, how it destroyed wealth, triggered mass unemployment, and created an unprecedented loss of control on employment, monetary policy, government budgets. Important topics encompassing the origin and impact of the crisis, governance failure, regulatory forgiveness, credit splurges, asset bubbles and the greed of institutions are analysed from wide-ranging perspectives of not only academics in both economics and law, but also from industry practitioners and regulators. This multidimensional evaluation of what went wrong concludes with an outline of what is currently being done to prevent another major crisis, and prescribes recommendations for the implementation of further preventative measures. This book will prove a compelling read for economics, finance and law scholars, as well as for practitioners including accountants, lawyers and financial market players. Contributors include: R.P Buckley, M. Bond, W. Byres, J. Carmichael, F. Clarke, K. Davis, G. Dean, J. Diplock, J. Farrar, A. Fels, N. Gaston, A. Khalid, R. MacKinnon, T. Makin

The papers provide a cutting-edge overview of general issues regarding world capital markets, experience in developing countries and capital market regulation, which many economists believe could turn into the number one topic in international business and economics.

These papers provide a cutting-edge overview of general issues regarding world capital markets, experience in developing countries, and capital market regulation, which many economists believe could turn into the number one topic in international business and economics.

Regulatory Competition and Economic Integration addresses one of the hottest policy questions on both sides of the Atlantic. Esty and Geradin bring together top-notch scholars from both Europe and the United States to examine the various aspects of the debate between 'harmonization' and 'regulatory competition' across three comparative dimensions. The book provides a sharp focus on the circumstances that would yield gains from regulatory competition and to contrast those cases where heightened co-operation in standard setting or broader regulatory harmonization might increase social welfare.

The yearbook presents annual data covering 12 years for countries appearing in the monthly issues of IFS. There are some additional time series in country tables and some additional tables of area and world aggregates. The International Financial Statistics Country Notes presents, in two sections, brief information on the data published in International Financial Statistics. Country Notes is designed to be a companion volume to IFS: the monthly print edition, the Yearbook, the CD-ROM, and the Internet version.

Based on a conference held in September 2005 on the future of the International Monetary Fund, this important new book includes an overview of the challenges facing the IMF today. In addition the book will look at four areas: the international monetary system and the IMF (with an emphasis on enforcing and reforming the rules), governance (including representation), fi nancial resources (the need for additional resources and how they should be supplied), and fi nancing from the fund (including the role of IMF fi nancing and the need for new facilities). Includes chapters by IMF managing director, Rodrigo deRato; Timothy D. Adams, the undersecretary for international affairs at the US Treasury Department; Kemal Dervi?, the head of the United Nations Development Program, the United Nation's Global Development Network; and John B. Taylor, former undersecretary for international affairs at the US Treasury Department.

This report contains the findings and recommendations of an independent blue-ribbon commission on the future international financial architecture. The commission was sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations, and co-chaired by Peter G. Peterson and Carla A. Hills, with the Institute for International Economics' Morris Goldstein serving as project director. The membership is listed below. The report analyzes the main factors that give rise to banking, currency, and debt crises, and it proposes a set of interrelated recommendations for improving crisis prevention and resolution. It also explains why the United States, despite its impressive overall economic performance since the outbreak of the Asian crisis, has a large stake in the future international financial architecture. The commission's recommendations aim at altering the behavior of emerging-market borrowers and their private creditors in ways that would reduce vulnerabilities in the exchange rate systems of emerging economies; inducing private creditors to accept their fair share of the costs of crisis resolution; reforming the IMF's lending policies; and refocusing the mandates of the IMF and the World Bank on leaner agendas. Its recommendations range well beyond the decisions taken to date by the international financial community. A series of dissenting opinions by individual members is included. Other members of the commission were Paul Allaire, C. Fred Bergsten, Kenneth Dam, George David, Jorge Dominguez, Kenneth Duberstein, Barry Eichengreen, Martin Feldstein, Maurice Greenberg, Lee Hamilton, John Heimann, Peter Kenen, Paul Krugman, Nicholas Lardy, David Lipton, Ray Marshall, Norman Ornstein, William Rhodes, Stephen Roach, Henry Schacht, James Schlesinger, George Soros, Laura Tyson, Ezra Vogel, Paul Volcker, and Vin Weber.

When Mexico's peso crisis occurred in December 1994, all of Latin America experienced the 'tequila effect'. In January 1998, after seven months of financial turmoil in East Asia, Alan Greenspan, the usually reticent Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank, noted that such 'vicious cycles...may, in fact, be a defining characteristic of the new high-tech international financial system'. This book examines the impact of the new, highly liquid portfolio capital flows on governments, opposition, politicians, business and the workforce in such emerging market countries as Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. Hailed as 'exemplary and innovative', 'fine-grained and accessible' and 'a must read', this collection of original essays in newly available in paperback.