Download or read book The Bretton Woods Agreements written by Naomi R. Lamoreaux and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 505 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Commentaries by top scholars alongside the most important documents and speeches concerning the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 The two world wars brought an end to a long-standing system of international commerce based on the gold standard. After the First World War, the weaknesses in the gold standard contributed to hyperinflation, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, and ultimately World War II. The Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 arose out of the Allies' desire to design a postwar international economic system that would provide a basis for prosperity, trade, and worldwide economic development. Alongside important documents and speeches concerning the adoption and evolution of the Bretton Woods system, this volume includes lively, readable, original essays on such topics as why the gold standard was doomed, how Bretton Woods encouraged the adoption of Keynesian economics, how the agreements influenced late-twentieth-century ideas of international development, and why the agreements ultimately had to give way to other arrangements.

Download or read book Debt and Entanglements Between the Wars written by Mr.Thomas J Sargent and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2019-11-08 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World War I created a set of forces that affected the political arrangements and economies of all the countries involved. This period in global economic history between World War I and II offers rich material for studying international monetary and sovereign debt policies. Debt and Entanglements between the Wars focuses on the experiences of the United States, United Kingdom, four countries in the British Commonwealth (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Newfoundland), France, Italy, Germany, and Japan, offering unique insights into how political and economic interests influenced alliances, defaults, and the unwinding of debts. The narratives presented show how the absence of effective international collaboration and resolution mechanisms inflicted damage on the global economy, with disastrous consequences.

Download or read book Peru written by Alejandro M. Werner and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2015-09-16 with total page 458 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peru stands out among Latin American countries as an example of successful economic reforms over the past decade. This comprehensive look at Peru's economy traces that country's journey from a debt crisis in the 1980s to having buffers in place that allowed it to emerge unscathed from the global financial crisis. The book examines the steps Peru undertook to achieve these results and extracts lessons to be learned. Chapters are written by IMF staff and Peruvian economists.

Download or read book Brazil written by Mr.Antonio Spilimbergo and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2019-03-14 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brazil is at crossroads, emerging slowly from a historic recession that was preceded by a huge economic boom. Reasons for the historic bust following a boom are manifold. Policy mistakes were an important contributory factor, and included the pursuit of countercyclical policies, introduced to deal with the effects of the global financial crisis, beyond the point where they were helpful. More fundamentally, it reflects longstanding structural weaknesses plaguing the economy, that also help explain Brazil’s uninspiring growth performance over the past four decades.

Download or read book South Koreans in the Debt Crisis written by Jesook Song and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2009-08-18 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: South Koreans in the Debt Crisis is a detailed examination of the logic underlying the neoliberal welfare state that South Korea created in response to the devastating Asian Debt Crisis (1997–2001). Jesook Song argues that while the government proclaimed that it would guarantee all South Koreans a minimum standard of living, it prioritized assisting those citizens perceived as embodying the neoliberal ideals of employability, flexibility, and self-sufficiency. Song demonstrates that the government was not alone in drawing distinctions between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor. Progressive intellectuals, activists, and organizations also participated in the neoliberal reform project. Song traces the circulation of neoliberal concepts throughout South Korean society, among government officials, the media, intellectuals, NGO members, and educated underemployed people working in public works programs. She analyzes the embrace of partnerships between NGOs and the government, the frequent invocation of a pervasive decline in family values, the resurrection of conservative gender norms and practices, and the promotion of entrepreneurship as the key to survival. Drawing on her experience during the crisis as an employee in a public works program in Seoul, Song provides an ethnographic assessment of the efforts of the state and civilians to regulate social insecurity, instability, and inequality through assistance programs. She focuses specifically on efforts to help two populations deemed worthy of state subsidies: the “IMF homeless,” people temporarily homeless but considered employable, and the “new intellectuals,” young adults who had become professionally redundant during the crisis but had the high-tech skills necessary to lead a transformed post-crisis South Korea.

Download or read book Shamans Nostalgias and the IMF written by Laurel Kendall and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty years ago, anthropologist Laurel Kendall did intensive fieldwork among South Korea’s (mostly female) shamans and their clients as a reflection of village women’s lives. In the intervening decades, South Korea experienced an unprecedented economic, social, political, and material transformation and Korean villages all but disappeared. And the shamans? Kendall attests that they not only persist but are very much a part of South Korean modernity. This enlightening and entertaining study of contemporary Korean shamanism makes the case for the dynamism of popular religious practice, the creativity of those we call shamans, and the necessity of writing about them in the present tense. Shamans thrive in South Korea’s high-rise cities, working with clients who are largely middle class and technologically sophisticated. Emphasizing the shaman’s work as open and mutable, Kendall describes how gods and ancestors articulate the changing concerns of clients and how the ritual fame of these transactions has itself been transformed by urban sprawl, private cars, and zealous Christian proselytizing. For most of the last century Korean shamans were reviled as practitioners of antimodern superstition; today they are nostalgically celebrated icons of a vanished rural world. Such superstition and tradition occupy flip sides of modernity’s coin—the one by confuting, the other by obscuring, the beating heart of shamanic practice. Kendall offers a lively account of shamans, who once ministered to the domestic crises of farmers, as they address the anxieties of entrepreneurs whose dreams of wealth are matched by their omnipresent fears of ruin. Money and access to foreign goods provoke moral dilemmas about getting and spending; shamanic rituals express these through the longings of the dead and the playful antics of greedy gods, some of whom have acquired a taste for imported whiskey. No other book-length study captures the tension between contemporary South Korean life and the contemporary South Korean shamans’ work. Kendall’s familiarity with the country and long association with her subjects permit nuanced comparisons between a 1970s "then" and recent encounters—some with the same shamans and clients—as South Korea moved through the 1990s, endured the Asian Financial Crisis, and entered the new millennium. She approaches her subject through multiple anthropological lenses such that readers interested in religion, ritual performance, healing, gender, landscape, material culture, modernity, and consumption will find much of interest here.

Download or read book International Monetary Fund Annual Report 1950 written by International Monetary Fund and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1950-09-01 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper reviews key findings of the IMF’s Annual Report for the fiscal year ended April 1950. The report highlights that the widespread devaluation of currencies that took place in September 1949 was the most far-reaching in any comparable period in recent times. Thirteen members agreed new par values with the IMF, most of them involving a devaluation of approximately 30.5 percent in relation to the U.S. dollar. Six member countries with which the IMF has no agreed par value also depreciated their exchange rates.

Download or read book International Financial Statistics Yearbook 2018 written by International Monetary Fund. Statistics Dept. and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 1471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 2018 yearbook issue of International Financial Statistics (IFS) is a standard source of statistics on all aspects of international and domestic finance. The IMF publishes calculated effective exchange rates data only for countries that have given their approval. The country, euro area, and world tables provide measures of effective exchange rates, compiled by the IMF’s Research Department, Statistics Department, and area departments. The real effective exchange rate index in line rec is derived from the nominal effective exchange rate index, adjusted for relative changes in consumer prices. Consumer price indices, often available monthly, are used as a measure of domestic costs and prices for these countries.

Download or read book Debt the IMF and the World Bank written by Eric Toussaint and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mainstream economists tell us that developing countries will replicate the economic achievements of the rich countries if they implement the correct “free-market”policies. But scholars and activists Toussaint and Millet demonstrate that this is patently false. Drawing on a wealth of detailed evidence, they explain how developed economies have systematically and deliberately exploited the less-developed economies by forcing them into unequal trade and political relationships. Integral to this arrangement are the international economic institutions ostensibly created to safeguard the stability of the global economy—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank—and the imposition of massive foreign debt on poor countries. The authors explain in simple language, and ample use of graphics, the multiple contours of this exploitative system, its history, and how it continues to function in the present day. Ultimately, Toussaint and Millet advocate cancellation of all foreign debt for developing countries and provide arguments from a number of perspectives—legal, economic, moral. Presented in an accessible and easily-referenced question and answer format, Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank is an essential tool for the global justice movement.

Download or read book 50 Years is Enough written by Kevin Danaher and published by South End Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) celebrate fifty years of economic dominion over the Third World, this reader brings the best progressive authors together to critique these two main proponents of neo-liberalism. 50 Years is Enough covers such topics as failed development projects, the feminization of poverty, the detruction of the environment, the internal workings of the World Bank and the IMF, and the struggle to build alternatives to neo-liberal policies.It also includes a guide to the many organizations involved in the struggle to reform the World Bank and the IMF.

Download or read book The IMF and the Silent Revolution written by Mr.James M. Boughton and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2000-09-11 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pamphlet is adapted from Chapter 1 of Silent Revolution: The International Monetary Fund, 1979-89, by the same author. That book is full of history of the evolution of the Fund during 11 years in which the institution truly came of age as a participant in the international financial system.

Download or read book Shutdown written by Adam Tooze and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-09-07 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book’s great service is that it challenges us to consider the ways in which our institutions and systems, and the assumptions, positions and divisions that undergird them, leave us ill prepared for the next crisis."—Robert Rubin, The New York Times Book Review "Full of valuable insight and telling details, this may well be the best thing to read if you want to know what happened in 2020." --Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books Deftly weaving finance, politics, business, and the global human experience into one tight narrative, a tour-de-force account of 2020, the year that changed everything--from the acclaimed author of Crashed. The shocks of 2020 have been great and small, disrupting the world economy, international relations and the daily lives of virtually everyone on the planet. Never before has the entire world economy contracted by 20 percent in a matter of weeks nor in the historic record of modern capitalism has there been a moment in which 95 percent of the world's economies were suffering all at the same time. Across the world hundreds of millions have lost their jobs. And over it all looms the specter of pandemic, and death. Adam Tooze, whose last book was universally lauded for guiding us coherently through the chaos of the 2008 crash, now brings his bravura analytical and narrative skills to a panoramic and synthetic overview of our current crisis. By focusing on finance and business, he sets the pandemic story in a frame that casts a sobering new light on how unprepared the world was to fight the crisis, and how deep the ruptures in our way of living and doing business are. The virus has attacked the economy with as much ferocity as it has our health, and there is no vaccine arriving to address that. Tooze's special gift is to show how social organization, political interests, and economic policy interact with devastating human consequences, from your local hospital to the World Bank. He moves fluidly from the impact of currency fluctuations to the decimation of institutions--such as health-care systems, schools, and social services--in the name of efficiency. He starkly analyzes what happened when the pandemic collided with domestic politics (China's party conferences; the American elections), what the unintended consequences of the vaccine race might be, and the role climate change played in the pandemic. Finally, he proves how no unilateral declaration of 'independence" or isolation can extricate any modern country from the global web of travel, goods, services, and finance.

Download or read book The IMF and the Latin American Debt Crisis written by Mr.James M. Boughton and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 1994-10-10 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The IMF played a key role in developing and implementing the debt strategy throughout the 1980s. That strategy not only overcame the crisis but also produced successful transformationsof several major economiesin Latin America. Nonetheless, the IMF's role has also been criticized on several grounds. This study examines seven such criticisms.

Download or read book Against Global Apartheid written by Patrick Bond and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2003 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 'Against Global Apartheid', Patrick Bond reveals the extent of the economic and human damage caused by policies implemented by World Bank and the IMF in developing countries, particularly South Africa, and argues that there is another way to more socially just economic development.

Download or read book The Economics of Contemporary Latin America written by Beatriz Armendariz and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-05-05 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analysis of Latin America's economy focusing on development, covering the colonial roots of inequality, boom and bust cycles, labor markets, and fiscal and monetary policy. Latin America is richly endowed with natural resources, fertile land, and vibrant cultures. Yet the region remains much poorer than its neighbors to the north. Most Latin American countries have not achieved standards of living and stable institutions comparable to those found in developed countries, have experienced repeated boom-bust cycles, and remain heavily reliant on primary commodities. This book studies the historical roots of Latin America's contemporary economic and social development, focusing on poverty and income inequality dating back to colonial times. It addresses today's legacies of the market-friendly reforms that took hold in the 1980s and 1990s by examining successful stabilizations and homemade monetary and fiscal institutional reforms. It offers a detailed analysis of trade and financial liberalization, twenty–first century-growth, and the decline in poverty and income inequality. Finally, the book offers an overall analysis of inclusive growth policies for development—including gender issues and the informal sector—and the challenges that lie ahead for the region, with special attention to pressing demands by the vibrant and vocal middle class, youth unemployment, and indigenous populations.

Download or read book The International Monetary Fund and Latin America written by Claudia Kedar and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has played a critical role in the global economy since the postwar era. But, claims Claudia Kedar, behind the strictly economic aspects of the IMF’s intervention, there are influential interactions between IMF technocrats and local economists—even when countries are not borrowing money. In The International Monetary Fund and Latin America, Kedar seeks to expose the motivations and constraints of the operations of both the IMF and borrowers. With access to never-before-seen archive materials, Kedar reveals both the routine and behind-the-scenes practices that have depicted International Monetary Fund–Latin American relations in general and the asymmetrical IMF-Argentina relations in particular. Kedar also analyzes the “routine of dependency” that characterizes IMF-borrower relations with several Latin American countries such as Chile, Peru, and Brazil. The International Monetary Fund and Latin America shows how debtor countries have adopted IMF’s policies during past decades and why Latin American leaders today largely refrain from knocking at the IMF’s doors again.

Download or read book Reforming the Governance of the IMF and the World Bank written by Ariel Buira and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2005-11-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The papers included in this book cover different aspects of the governance of the Bretton Woods institutions. They explore different options for reform and show that enhancing the participation of developing and emerging market countries in resolving the major monetary and financial problems confronting the world economy, would improve global economic performance and contribute to the elimination of world poverty.