IMF aims to fight financial crises with regional approach

The International Monetary Fund hopes to enhance cooperation with regional financing arrangements (RFAs) to ensure more timely and effective help to countries in financial crisis.

RFAs are financing mechanisms backed by a group of countries that pledge common financial support to a fellow member in the event of external liquidity needs or balance of payments difficulties.

The BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) set up by China, Brazil, India, Russia and South Africa, and the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization (CMIM) set up by the 10-ASEAN nations and China, Japan and South Korea are two of the seven such arrangements the IMF has in mind.

A paper released by the IMF on Monday outlines operational principles to help guide future co-lending between the IMF and the various RFAs. “Recent experience with colending highlights the importance of early and evolving engagement between the RFA and the fund,” the IMF said.

The IMF also stressed the importance of exploiting complementarities in collaboration, the need for mutual respect in institutional independence and capacity of the partner.

The IMF believes that enhanced collaboration could increase the effective firepower of both parties to tackle largescale crises.

“While smooth collaboration in lending activities can help crisis fighting, collaboration in surveillance and capacity development can improve crisis prevention,” the IMF said.

Although most IMF cofinancing cases with RFAs have been in Europe in past years, it has conducted a test run with the CMIM in 2016.

“The proposals in this paper benefited from a productive dialogue with several major RFAs, including the CMIM,” Nathan Porter, deputy chief of the emerging markets division of the IMF and lead author of the IMF paper, told China Daily on Monday.

“These RFAs agreed about the importance of strengthening the collaboration between the IMF and RFAs, and broadly supported our proposals as a way forward,” Porter said.

In a meeting in Hamburg, Germany, in early July, Chang Junhong, a former official of China’s Ministry of Finance and now director of the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office (AMRO), also emphasized the importance of cooperation between global and regional financial arrangements as safety nets against financial crises.

AMRO was an independent regional surveillance unit set up by ASEAN, China, Japan and South Korea to monitor and analyze regional economies and support the implementation of the Chian Mai Initiative Multilateralization.

Many countries in Asia, such as Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines were hit hard by 1997 Asian financial crisis, while the global financial crisis since 2008 has hit a large number of countries around the world, in particular Europe.