ABSTRACT
The financial crisis showed how dysfunctional the current international macr- oeconomic and financial architecture (financial architecture, for short) is for managing today’s global economy. The need to govern globalization has never been clearer but at the same time the institutional arrangements to do so have never been so inadequate. The calls for and steps taken to reform the financial architecture are, therefore, welcome. Similar calls for reform were made after the Asian and Russian crises of 1997 and 1998, which engulfed most of the developing world (including the so-called “emerging economies”) in deep reces- sions, but led at best to marginal reforms. The fact that this time the industrial countries have been at the centre of the storm has led to greater action, but has also implied that some measures of direct interest to developing countries have been marginalized from the agenda.
