IMF Policies for Financial Crises Preventions in Emerging Markets

In emerging markets, policies for preventing and managing financial crises should be understood following the standard open economy macroeconomics text treatment. This, however, will prevent us from fully comprehending how to deal with these crises. To deal with financial crises in emerging markets, this paper brings about more promising theoretical tools borrowed from the interdisciplinary field of optimal policy design. It also considers the possibility that more than one market failure may occur simultaneously. The theoretical tools discussed here should serve to improve existing prevention and management policies. Admittedly, the interdisciplinary field of optimal policy design is comparatively young, thus offering scarce empirical support for disentangling competing models. Given this inability to decide upon the best possible model, we should consider at least two constraints that policy makers will deal with in the real world of financial crises. First, given that policy makers make crucial choices between parsimonious and innovative measures, this paper recommends parsimony because of the uncertainty about the true model. Second, high political implementation costs will always be present, and these are positively correlated with supranational institutional requirements. Considering issues of both parsimony and political constraints, we argue that any attempt to internationally harmonize rules and codes must be done with caution. With this framework in mind, we review some of the recent proposals about emerging markets crisis prevention. From the point of view of emerging countries and creditor countries taken as a whole, and benevolent IFIs, we conclude that promoting GDP indexed sovereign bonds is the best available proposal for crises prevention. In this paper, we leave aside the debate of the political economy or governance reform issues of the IFIs