Special issue: Has crisis changed the IMF?
A forthcoming special issue of Governance (28.2, April 2015) will consider how the 2008 financial crisis has changed policy and practice within the International Monetary Fund. The special issue is co-edited by professors Cornel Ban and Kevin Gallagher of the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University.
Ban and Gallagher explain the aims of the special issue:
Recently, the IMF has been in the headlines as a critic of austerity, inequality and unrestricted capital movements. This is in stark contrast to its conventional pre-crisis image as rigid international bully imposing draconian policies on countries in trouble.
Cornel Ban and Daniela Gabor at workshop for special issue at Boston University
In the special issue of Governance, the contributors examine how extensive these changes have been in both theory and in practice and provide explanations of the resulting patterns of stability and change. They find extensive evidence that the Fund has indeed experienced a significant recalibration of its policy advice and supervision since the 2008 crisis and attribute this outcome to staff politics, the rise of the BRICS’s or shifts in the economics profession.
However, not all changes in policy doctrine traveled into the IMF’s policy practice. Moreover, deeper shifts in policy doctrine were largely tempered by the nature of the institution and the powerful interests that control its governing structure. To make these arguments, the contributions examine fiscal policy, sovereign debt policy, structural reforms, capital controls and financial sector stability.
All of the papers in the special issue are now published on Governance EarlyView:
Introduction. Recalibrating Policy Orthodoxy: The IMF since the Great Recession.
André Broome, Back to Basics: The Great Recession and the Narrowing of IMF Policy Advice
Kevin P. Gallagher, Contesting the Governance of Capital Flows at the IMF
Daniela Gabor, The IMF’s Rethink of Global Banks: Critical in Theory, Orthodox in Practice
Aitor Erce, Banking on Seniority: The IMF and the Sovereign’s Creditors
Leonard Seabrooke and Emelie Rebecca Nilsson, Professional Skills in International Financial Surveillance: Assessing Change in IMF Policy Teams
Professors Ban and Gallagher will host a lunch discussion about the special issue on November 20, 2014, 12:30-2:00pm, at The Pardee School for Global Studies, Bay State Rd. 121, Boston. More details here. Boston University also profiles the special issue here.
