By Rachel Thrasher The European Union officially voted to withdraw from the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) on May 30, after several years of increasing agitation over the role of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), a controversial legal tool in international investment agreements (IIAs) that fossil fuel companies can use when the value of their investments are […]
By Tim Hirschel-Burns In July 1944—80 years ago—delegates from 44 nations met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. Over the course of three weeks, they designed an agreement that led to the establishment of the Bretton Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which was later joined […]
July 2024 marks the 80th anniversary of the Bretton Woods Agreement that established the post-World War II multilateral economic order, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the precursor to the World Bank, and early global trade governance systems that provided the structure and form of the World Trade Organization (WTO), established in 1995. A new […]
By Jwala Rambarran This month, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) marks its 80th anniversary amid various proposals on how to reform the global financial architecture to make it fit-for-purpose in the 21st century. Climate change poses a particular, and urgent, opportunity for reform. Many of the IMF’s developing country members are grappling with severe fiscal and […]
By Timon Forster It has been three years since the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – the organization tasked with monitoring the international monetary and financial system – determined that its mandate encompasses the macro-economic consequences of global warming (e.g., the pressure of natural disasters on government coffers). In the meantime, the Fund has hired climate […]
By Laurissa Mühlich, Barbara Fritz and William N. Kring Following the COVID-19 pandemic, low- and middle-income countries (LICs and MICs, respectively), and in particular lower MICs, have recovered more slowly than high-income countries (HICs). LICs and MICs continue to struggle with tighter fiscal constraints in a period when they should be scaling up investments to […]
By Marina Zucker-Marques, Laurissa Mühlich, Barbara Fritz, Thomas Goda What once consisted of only the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has become a complex, multilayered and non-coordinated network of institutions aimed at supporting countries during times of financial distress. This network is known as the Global Financial Safety Net (GFSN), and comprises the IMF, regional financial […]
Since the 2007-09 global financial crisis, central bank currency swaps have become a crucial element of the Global Financial Safety Net (GFSN)—the set of institutions and arrangements that backstop countries in financial distress. These swaps, where credit lines between central banks aim to provide liquidity to stabilizing markets during turmoil, have two key advantages: immediate […]
By Leslie Elliott Armijo and Verónica Rubio Vega Sepehr What can an international relations (IR) perspective reveal about cooperation within regional development banks—and vice versa? From the viewpoint of Latin America, the most democratic region within the Global South and the only one where most countries have been independent polities for two centuries, there have […]
What factors help or impede international cooperation within regions of the Global South? A new working paper from Leslie Elliott Armijo and Verónica Rubio Vega Sepehr examines how variations in the geographic scope of a region can result in different types of power (im)balances among members, in turn generating important consequences for both the depth […]