Grimes Represents GDP Center at T20 Meetings in Tokyo

William Grimes, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, represented the Global Development Policy (GDP) Center at the T20 in Tokyo from December 4-5, 2018. This is the second year in which then GDP Center will be the U.S. think tank representative on international financial architecture at the T20.

Formed in 2008 at the beginning of the global financial crisis, the Group of Twenty (G20) is composed of the world’s 20 leading economies. The T20 is a network of think tanks in the G20 countries that provide formal advice to the G20 governments on a variety of key issues. G20 leadership rotates annually among the group’s twenty members, with each year’s host government setting an agenda for a year’s worth of activities and discussions leading up to a summit for heads of state. The T20 thinktanks are requested by the host government to offer analyses and proposals to address its priorities for the year.

As the host country for 2019, Japan designated 10 issue-areas in which to commission T20 advice, including the Sustainable Development Goals, international financial architecture, climate change and the environment, infrastructure, cooperation with Africa, global governance, future of work and education, trade and investment, supporting small and medium-sized enterprises, and societal aging.

Kevin Gallagher, Director of the GDP Center and Professor of Global Development Policy at the Pardee School, is one of the co-leaders of the task force on “International Financial Architecture for Stability and Development.” The GDP Center’s role in the T20 builds upon Gallagher’s original research on capital controls and IMF reform, as well as research by Grimes and GDP Center Associate Director William Kring on regional financial arrangements in Asia, Latin America, and Europe. The mission of the T20 task force on international financial architecture is to make recommendations on the crucial issue of how to reform international rules and institutions in order to prevent and manage international financial crises.

To support its T20 role, the GDP Center will be holding a workshop for experts on capital flows and financial architecture in late February to inform its policy recommendations to the G20. Building on rigorous academic research and utilizing a process peer review, the task force will produce a brief policy paper for the G20 summit. An example from the 2018 T20, which was co-authored by Professor Gallagher and was presented in Argentina earlier in December 2018, may be found here.

Grimes, who has taught at Boston University since 1996, is a leading scholar of East Asian financial regionalism. His 2008 book Currency and Contest in East Asia: The Great Power Politics of Financial Regionalism won the 2010 Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize and received Honorable Mention for the 2009 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award. More recently, in conjunction with the Pardee School’s Global Economic Governance Initiative, he led a research project for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to develop a guide to best practices for regional liquidity arrangements.

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