Volume 13, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Repairing the Global Financial Safety Net; Editors: Kevin Gallagher and Jeronim Capaldo

Although climate change poses a serious threat to macrofinancial stability and economic development, the global financial safety has so far failed to sufficiently address this challenge. This article reviews the extent to which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has started to integrate climate change in its analytical and operational frameworks, showing significant shortcomings in addressing the risks emanating from climate change. Regional financing arrangements (RFAs) have to date not engaged or only very little in addressing climate-related risks. Against this backdrop, this article argues that the IMF and also RFAs need to climate-proof their policies and frameworks and puts forward eight recommendations: (i) mainstream systematic and transparent assessments of climate-related financial risks in all operations; (ii) introduce consistent, systematic, and universal appraisal and treatment of physical and transition risks in surveillance and monitoring for all countries; (iii) ensure that all policy recommendations are aligned with the Paris climate goals; (iv) advance disclosure of climate-related financial risks and promote sustainable finance and investment practices; (v) support member countries in mainstreaming climate risk analysis in public financial management; (vi) support climate-vulnerable countries in dealing with debt sustainability problems; (vii) develop lending instruments for climate emergency financing; and (viii) in the case of the IMF, explore options to use SDRs to support climate-vulnerable countries.

In 2009, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) reformed its lending arrangements and conditionality. Thereafter, it has pursued “parsimony,” emphasizing headline fiscal adjustments rather than detailed budgetary changes. This paper analyzes the extent to which these reforms have resulted in changes to the overall austerity required by IMF agreements. We create a new variable measuring the level of fiscal consolidation required in each IMF program from 2001 through 2021 the IMF Fiscal Adjustment Indicator (IMF FAI). We explore whether IMF austerity eased after the financial crisis and the later COVID-19 pandemic. We also estimate the economic and political determinants that help explain varying levels of IMF austerity across IMF programs during this period. We find that IMF conditions were less austere for the years of 2009 and 2020, but quickly returned to their previous levels, echoing the IMF’s advice to “keep the receipts” during crises. However, these temporary relaxations were not statistically significant, pointing to overarching continuity. We find that countries that were granted relatively more lenient conditionality were found to be those with closer relations with major shareholders of the IMF: Western Europe and the United States. In contrast, countries with close diplomatic relations with China face higher IMF austerity.

Among the drivers of socio-economic development, this article focuses on an important yet insufficiently understood international-level determinant: the spread of austerity policies to the developing world by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In offering loans to developing countries in exchange for policy reforms, the IMF typically sets the fiscal parameters within which development occurs. Using an original dataset of IMF-mandated austerity targets, we examine how policy reforms prescribed in IMF programs affect inequality and poverty. Our empirical analyses span a panel of up to 79 countries for the period 2002–2018. Using instrumentation techniques, we control for the possibility that these relationships are driven by the IMF imposing harsher austerity measures precisely in countries with more problematic economies. Our findings show that stricter austerity is associated with greater income inequality for up to two years, and that this effect is driven by concentrating income to the top 10% of earners while all other deciles lose out. We also find that stricter austerity is associated with higher poverty headcounts and poverty gaps. Taken together, our findings suggest that the IMF neglects the multiple ways its own policy advice contributed to social inequity in the developing world.

We analyze recent theoretical advances in the area of capital flow management and compare them with the IMF’s policy frameworks in the area, as laid out in the IMF’s Institutional View and related documents. Although the Institutional View represented an important leap forward, we discuss several tensions with the academic literature. We also emphasize the important role that the IMF guidance could play in building a better set of policy instruments to deal with volatile capital flows. More broadly, individual countries need sufficient policy space to pursue their individual welfare objectives. Finally, we propose how to strengthen the IMF’s analytical framework for international spillovers.

The global financial safety net (GFSN) has become increasingly voluminous and complex. The ever-increasing capacity for crisis prevention and liquidity support of emergency financing institutions and arrangements at the bilateral, regional, and global level sums up to a total lending capacity of at least US$ 3.5 trillion (Mühlich, L., B. Fritz, W. N. Kring, and K. P. Gallagher. 2020. The Global Financial Safety Net Tracker: Lessons for the COVID-19 Crisis from a New Interactive Dataset . GEGI Policy Brief 10. Boston: Global Development Policy Center. Also available at:www.bu.edu/gdp/files/2020/04/GEGI-GDP_PolicyBrief_FInal.pdf). This represents a more than tenfold increase to available short-term liquidity compared to before the global financial crisis of 2008/09. Yet despite this tremendous increase in resources, the GFSN remains scarcely utilized throughout the COVID-19 crisis. This article develops a framework, that builds upon concepts in economics and international political economy, to analyze GFSN inefficiencies and to evaluate the utilization of the GFSN. Combining balance of payments models with the concept of regime complexity, we analyze and compare patterns of GFSN utilization in response to COVID-19 with past usage. We ask if the current GFSN is adequately built to efficiently respond to such a crisis. We are especially interested in examining the role that the six existing RFAs between EMDEs play in the GFSN.

The 1997–98 Asian financial crisis marked a turning point in the IMF’s previously negative views on the usefulness of capital account restrictions, culminating eventually in the publication of the Fund’s new Institutional View (IV) on the topic in 2012. The IV acknowledged that full capital account liberalization may not always be appropriate, accepted that new restrictions could at times have a useful role to play even in countries that had previously liberalized, and spelled out a specific set of circumstances under which the deploying of new restrictions could be justified as temporary measures in response to large capital flows. This paper documents the important role that empirical research, both by the profession at large as well as by the Fund’s own staff, played in supporting the first two components of the IV. It argues, however, that, empirical support is lacking with respect to the third component of the IV: the conditions under which the deployment of temporary capital account restrictions may be desirable. The conditions stipulated under the IV, which have the effect of considerably restricting the scope of circumstances in which the use of restrictions may be appropriate, are not fully justified by empirical evidence or recent experience and are best understood simply as a vestige of the institution’s pre-IV hostility to the use of restrictions.