Global Economic Governance

A currency war would be no bad thing
The European Central Bank has finally begun to engage in quantitative easing. The euro depreciated on the news, which is good for the Europeans but bad for the rest of the world,…
How Greece and Europe can both win
The press is making much of the academic qualifications of Greece's new finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis. His specialisation is economic game theory, which in this case might be…
Do multinational corporations pay all the tax they should?
Is this a silly question to ask, given the reported low taxes paid by Google, Apple, Yahoo, Starbucks and others? The G20 and OECD think there is a major problem and have launched…
How much is too much? The debt mystery
The 2008 financial crisis left no doubt that ill-considered debt can cause major damage not just to an individual country, but to the global economy. You might think that by now,…
Australia is not meeting its IEA oil reserve targets
The plunge in the global oil price is a hot topic. Between June 2014 and January 2015, the price of crude has dropped by 57%. Most of the attention has been on the boon for…
Memo to IMF reformers: Don't let Congress get you down
By Lowy Institute Non-Resident Fellow Mike Callaghan and G20 Research Fellow Tristram Sainsbury When it comes to IMF quota reform, the words of Yogi Berra come to mind: 'It's like…
Is globalisation slowing?
In the decades leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, international trade typically grew much faster than GDP. This reflected increasing global economic integration: tariff…
The IMF's pessimism is misplaced
When the IMF produced its last World Economic Outlook in October, one of the risks it forecast was a possible oil price increase. A US$25 per barrel increase, the IMF said, would…
Indonesia leads on petrol subsidies, but will others follow?
The fall in the world oil price has created the opportunity to eliminate petroleum subsidies in a number of Southeast Asian countries. These subsidies have been the long-standing…
No, the IMF did not cause the Ebola crisis
Headlines blaming the IMF for the Ebola crisis are something you may expect in the tabloid press. However, a robust debate on the role of the IMF in the spread of Ebola was…