IMF lending is conditional on a country's commitment to carry out an agreed program of economic policies. Unless that commitment is genuine and broadly held, the likelihood of implementation will be poor. Is there a conflict between national commitment and conditional finance? Are national...

Two economists designed the main features of the charter of the IMF during World War II: John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White. Several of those features are attributable primarily to White, including the adoption of fixed but adjustable exchange rates, the funding of operations with...

The low level of primary commodity prices since 1985 is examined in the context of the behavior of those prices relative to prices of manufactured goods since 1854. The Prebisch-Singer hypothesis of a secular decline in relative commodity prices is sustained, but the recent decline is shown to...

The CFA franc zone comprises a group of countries in central and west Africa whose currencies have been firmly linked to the French franc since 1948. It combines the features of a currency union with those of an exchange rate peg, and an analysis of its effectiveness must examine both...

This paper provides estimates of the demand for both narrow and broad monetary aggregates for the five largest industrial countries using two recent approaches: buffer stock and error correction models. The performances of these models are compared with several versions of the conventional...

The International Monetary Fund was designed during World War II by men whose worldview had been shaped by the Great War and the Great Depression. Their views on how the postwar international monetary system should function were also shaped by their economics training and their nationalities....

A recent paper by Baba, Hendry, and Starr presents an error-correction model of the demand for M1 in the United States, which shows a dramatic improvement in both fit and stability over earlier models. This note estimates an alternative model with the same data set and draws two conclusions:...

The IMF was established in 1944 in part to “give confidence” to member countries by providing short-term credits. Although the intention was that the availability of the Fund’s resources should prevent countries from experiencing financial crises, in practice the institution often has...