The IMF and the Politics of Financial Globalization: From the Asian Crisis to a New International Financial Architecture?

Thirkell-White (international relations, U. of St. Andrews, UK) takes an explicitly political approach to evaluating the International Monetary Fund in this work. Instead of asking, as in most of the literature, whether the Fund's policies are effective relative to some technical criterion, he analyzes who is in a position to determine policies and what their motivations are in doing so, focusing on the question of political legitimacy as it played itself out during the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s. He begins the discussion with an examination of the Fund's own legitimating justifications and political challenges to the Fund as partial consequence of longer-term declines in it political legitimacy. Finally, he considers ways that the Fund's legitimacy can be reestablished. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR