A Development-Friendly Reform of the International Financial Architecture

Policy Study

“The financial crisis has shown how dysfunctional the current international financial architecture is to manage today’s global economy. The need to govern globalisation has never been clearer, but at the same time the institutional arrangements that we have had never been so impotent. The calls for deep reforms of such architecture and even for a second Bretton Woods Conference are, therefore most welcome. Similar calls for reform were made after the Asian and Russian crises, which engulfed most of the developing world in deep recessions, but they led to  at best marginal reforms. The fact that this time the industrial countries are at the center of the storm may lead them into action, but also creates the risk that measures of direct interest to developing countries may be marginalised in the current debate.”

Paper prepared for FEPS and IPD by Jose Antonio OCAMPO, co-President of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University