The International Monetary System: Living with Asymmetry
NBER Working Paper No. 17641
Issued in December 2011
NBER Program(s):Economic Fluctuations and Growth, International Finance and Macroeconomics
This paper analyzes current stresses in the two key areas that concerned the architects of the original Bretton Woods system: international liquidity and exchange rate management. Despite radical changes since World War II in the market context for liquidity and exchange rate concerns, they remain central to discussions of international macroeconomic policy coordination. To take two prominent examples of specific (and related) coordination problems, liquidity issues are paramount in strategies of national self-insurance through foreign reserve accumulation, while recent attempts by emerging market economies (EMEs) to limit real currency appreciation have relied heavily on nominal exchange rate management. A central message is that a diverse set of potential asymmetries among sovereign member states provides fertile ground for a variety of coordination failures. The paper goes on to discuss institutions and policies that might mitigate some of these inefficiencies.
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Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w17641
Published: The International Monetary System: Living with Asymmetry, Maurice Obstfeld. in Globalization in an Age of Crisis: Multilateral Economic Cooperation in the Twenty-First Century, Feenstra and Taylor. 2014