ABSTRACT
Ever since the Basle accords of 1988, progressively harmonised prudential regulation has been required of banks participating in the global economy; since the early 1990s, policies towards emerging market economies have been dominated by the Washington consensus (Williamson 1994:26–8), which looked to financial (and trade) liberalisation as the way to growth and prosperity. But the need to sequence these steps was not emphasised, and emerging market economies were, in effect, encouraged to liberalise markets as quickly as possible. In April 1997, for example, the Interim Committee of the IMF came out in favour of amending the IMF articles to make the capital account liberalisation one of the purposes of the Fund ( Eichengreen 1999 :116).
