بی ثباتی مالی جهانی: نقش صندوق بین المللی پول، اتحادیه اروپا و پیمان نفتا

This paper argues that the global monetary system has exhibited significant instability since the collapse of the Bretton Woods regime in 1971. The current challenge for economists and policy makers is the creation of a global monetary system that offers greater exchange rate stability without sacrificing international capital mobility. This paper proposes a solution that consists of three components. First, strengthening the international financial architecture to bring stability, primarily to emerging nations. Second, eventually creating a monetary union in NAFTA and extending it to other countries of the Western Hemisphere to bring stability to this region à la the European Monetary Union (EMU). Third, coordinating economic policies among the U.S., EU and Japan to stabilize these three key global currencies.

In his Nobel Lecture, Professor Robert Mundell (2000) argues that although the 20th century began with a highly stable global monetary system in the form of the gold standard, it ended with dysfunctional volatility of exchange rates that frequently caused global monetary crises. Mundell concludes that the global monetary system with which the 20th century closed was inferior to that with which it began. Thus, the challenge to economists and policy makers today is to design a system that offers greater exchange rate stability and experiences fewer financial crises. In this paper, we first review the instabilities of the current global monetary system and, second, argue that the system’s stability can be improved. Improvements include reform of the international financial architecture and the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), greater cooperation within regions and enhanced policy coordination among regions. In Section 2, we review the relevant features of the current global monetary system and define the meaning of instability. In Section 3, we examine the Asian financial crises as an illustration of the difficulties faced by the global monetary system. The Asian crises have led academics and policy makers to call for a new architecture for the global monetary system. These ideas are discussed in Section 4. Then, in Section 5, we review the experiences of the European Monetary System (EMS) and European Monetary Union (EMU) with an eye to lessons for monetary cooperation in the Western Hemisphere. These considerations suggest a three-part reform program anchored by a stronger, more resilient international financial architecture, designed to ensure greater monetary stability generally and among emerging nations in particular. The second component of our proposal seeks to improve regional stability among groups of trading partners. We examine the European experience and argue that it provides a viable model for the U.S. and its trading partners in the Western Hemisphere. The final component addresses the management of monetary and financial relations among the major regional blocs in Europe, the Western Hemisphere, and in Asia, clustered around Japan. These ideas are developed in 6 and 7. Section 8 discusses two possible alternative scenarios focused on Tobin-type taxes or floating exchange rates. Section 9 concludes.

This paper represents an attempt to improve the performance of global monetary arrangements. The objective is to reduce financial instability and enhance the system’s ability to prevent exchange-rate crises altogether or to deal with them more effectively when they occur. It begins by examining recent exchange-rate crises in Asia and monetary cooperation in the EMU. Both experiences provide important insights and lessons for improving the global system. Any attempt to improve the system’s performance must take account of the constraints imposed by the “impossible trinity,” according to which economies can at most achieve two of the following three objectives: stable exchange rates, capital mobility and autonomous macro policies. The approach proposed here gives priority to the first two objectives and develops ways of accommodating the constraint on policy autonomy. The proposal has three building blocks, each designed to make domestic policies conform with the systemic constraint. The first block focuses on the international financial infrastructure, seeking to improve the multilateral guidelines for fiscal, monetary, and financial policies and tightening standards of performance as well as surveillance. This block is important because it helps set the framework conditions. As the world’s financial and capital markets become more integrated, the need for common standards asserts itself. Although improvements in systemic architecture play a crucial role, they cannot solve all problems. Regional cooperation designed to enhance monetary stability among groups of trading partners can make an important contribution. Our model here is the EMU: it provides a tested example for greater monetary and financial cooperation in the Western Hemisphere. Improvements in global architecture and greater regional cooperation will go a long way toward reducing uncertainty and enhancing financial stability. That leaves relations among the three major economies—the EU, Japan (with possible linkages to other Asian economies) and the monetary bloc in the Western Hemisphere. In order to ensure stability of exchange rates within the group—among the euro, yen, and dollar—we propose intra-group policy coordination in a process that would mimic the Maastricht Treaty’s convergence criteria.