" Turbulent Waters: Cross-Border Finance and International Governance advocates faster progress in reforming the international financial system. Its most important theme is the need for national governments and international organizations to upgrade their collective efforts at crisis prevention and prosperity management. The core of such efforts is the supranational surveillance of cross-border ""traffic regulations"" and the cooperative monitoring of nations' macroeconomic, exchange rate, and balance-of-payments policies. Concurrently, governments should streamline and strengthen the intermediation of intergovernmental lending for the liability financing of payments deficits through the International Monetary Fund. This essay gives detailed analysis supporting these conclusions and provides more technical discussion of the incremental policy measures needed to strengthen these collective efforts. "

Today's world is organized politically into nation states with sovereign national governments. But as Ralph C. Bryant explains in Turbulent Waters, the world's economic structure is outgrowing its political structure. The economic links among nations have increased more rapidly than economic activity itself. As economic integration has proceeded, borders have become more porous, differences among national economies have eroded, and the policy autonomy of national governments has been undermined. Collective-governance problems increasingly spill across national borders and thus grow in importance relative to problems of domestic governance. The evolving need for international cooperation and cross-border collective governance is likely to be the single most prominent feature of world politics and economics for at least the next half century. The progressive integration of the world economy, often called " globalization, " has been especially dramatic for financial activity. Cross-border financial transactions facilitate saving and investment and thereby advance the well-being of individuals. But they can also generate turbulence and instability. Most individuals are unsure whether financial globalization promotes or threatens prosperity for a majority of the world's people. Bryant explains basic concepts about financial activity and collective governance, distills their international dimensions, and enables general readers to acquire a solid grasp of the key policy issues that national governments must resolve. He provides fresh insights about what is often termed the international financial architecture. But he also casts his net far wider: the book's ambitious goal is no lessthan to outline a pragmatically sound vision for the evolution of international governance for the world economy and financial system.

The world's governing structures are higgledy-piggledy: disorderly, heads and tails in any or every direction. Such disorder fosters deficient governance. Decisions by noncooperating nations can generate damaging crossborder outcomes. Muddles destabilize mutual well-being.Public debate is often mired in superficial arguments about "globalization." This insightful book by economist Ralph C. Bryant instead emphasizes that the world's nations need to craft better middle-ground compromises to improve governance and manage increasing integration. Individual nations, Bryant argues, should fashion a balance between local autonomy and external openness, avoiding the extremes of rigid localism and unfettered openness. And nations need to act together collectively. Cooperative governance can encourage orderliness that mitigates disarray undermining mutual goals. The global challenge of the coronavirus pandemic is a vivid reminderthat international cooperation is becoming progressively more essential. Do nations and their leaders have sufficient foresight to use borders not as barriers but as catalysts for international cooperation? Could national migration policies find sustainable middle ground between the unrealistic extreme of unfettered freedom for people to cross borders and the inhumane exclusion of foreign refugees? Could augmented cross-border cooperation mitigate dangers from recurring financial instability? Could the world community foster collective actions to reduce the severe risks of global climate change? The answer to such questions can and should be yes. Wiser cross-border collective action nurtures a mutually supportive order offsetting the threats of disorder that may otherwise prevail. A healthy evolution of our planet requires requires! more orderly national governance and more ambitious cross-border cooperation.

As cross-border transactions and economic integration among nations have increased, formerly neglected differences among the domestic economic policies of nations have become progressively exposed to international scrutiny. National governments trying to pursue autonomous polices have found their decisions more difficult and the consequences of their decisions more uncertain. These trends have in turn provoked debate about whether governments should cooperate more fully when making their policy decisions. In this book, part of the Integrating National Economies series, Ralph A. Bryant considers how much national governments might benefit from coordination of their macroeconomic stabilization polices, the circumstances in which they might cooperation; and how ambitious that cooperation should be. Bryant argues that the potential benefits of attempted coordination are often greater than the potential risks. When national decisionmakers take into account the cross-border spillovers of their actions, and especially if the are prepared to consider mutually beneficial adjustments of their policy instruments, each cooperating nation may be able to attain higher levels of welfare. Bryant discusses circumstances in which efforts to coordinate could prove counterproductive. On the whole, however, he contends that efforts to coordinate policies internationally typically deserve examination and, frequently, can be expected to advance the common interests of nations' citizens. Bryant identifies and analyzes different forms of intergovernmental cooperation for monetary, fiscal, and exchange rate policies. One of the contributors of the book compares and evaluates three different analyticalperspectives: the traditional policy-optimization approach favored by economists, the rule analysis of international regime environments, and the institutional analysis developed by scholars of international relations and political science. The book concludes with an overview of historical experience and practical recommendations for the medium-run and long-run evolution of international macroeconomic cooperation.