A 'Global Economic Institutions' (GEI) research programme funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council was initiated at the beginning of 1994. The purpose of the programme is to study how existing global economic institutions and regimes operate, how they might be improved, and whether new institutions are needed. Initial research in the programme has focused on the future of the international monetary system and the role of the IMF. Plans are also underway in the areas of international competition policy and the regulation of new information services, and regionalism. The Director of the programme is David Vines (University of Oxford and CEPR). A programme newsletter was launched in August by CEPR with the aim of keeping a wide audience in touch with the programme's output.

The first GEI programme workshop on 'The Future of Global Economic Institutions' was held at CEPR on 22/23 March. The first session was chaired by Jim Rollo (Foreign and Commonwealth Office): Max Corden (Johns Hopkins University) presented a paper on 'The IMF and the World Bank, followed by Jesus Seade (World Trade Organization) on 'The Future of the World Trade Organisation and its Relations with Other Global Economic Institutions'. The second session was chaired by Andrew Crockett (Bank for International Settlements) at which Mike Neilson (DGII, European Commission) gave 'A Personal View from Brussels: Coordination, Global Coherence and Regionalism'. At dinner, Sir Nigel Wicks (HM Treasury) spoke on 'The G7 Coordination Process.

On the second day of the workshop, Jill Hills (City University) chaired the first session: David Vines presented 'Asia-Pacific Regionalism: A View of the Implications for Europe', followed by Paul David (All Souls College, Oxford, and Stanford University) on 'Institutional Rules and Delays in Agreement on Technical Standards', and Peter Holmes (Sussex University) on 'The WTO and Competition Policy: Opportunities and Obstacles'. In the closing session chaired by Nicholas Crafts (University of Warwick and CEPR), Marcus Miller (University of Warwick and CEPR) presented 'The IMF as a Discipline Device: What does Economic Theory Tell Us?', followed by Pinar Bagci (University of Cambridge) and William Perraudin (Birkbeck College, London, and CEPR) on 'Do IMF Programmes Work?'. A full report of the workshop is in issue one of the GEI newsletter.

The second GEI workshop was on 'Political Economy, Sovereign Debt and the Role of the IMF'. It was held in Cambridge on 7/8 July, and organized by Marcus Miller, William Perraudin and Jonathan Thomas (University of Warwick). The first paper was by James Boughton (IMF) on 'The IMF and the Latin American Debt Crisis: Seven Common Criticisms', and this was followed by Anne Sibert (Virginia Polytechnic) on 'The Timing of Privatization' (written with William Perraudin), a paper which uses a bargaining model to examine the timing of this particular type of structural reform. In 'Sovereign Debt Buybacks Revisited', Jonathan Thomas reconsidered the arguments against sovereign debt buybacks, presenting a 'willingness-to-pay' model in which the sovereign determines repayments as the solution to an explicit welfare maximization problem.

In 'The Political Economy of Savings Behaviour and the Role of the International Financial Institutions', Joshua Aizenman (Dartmouth College) and Andrew Powell (Banco Central de Argentina) provided an explanation of why many governments facing volatile revenue streams appear to have woefully inadequate savings. In 'The IMF and the 1982 and 1994 Crises: Who is in Charge?', Michael Dooley (University of California, Santa Cruz) examined the role of the IMF as financial intermediary in the 'political credit market'. In 'Seigniorage, Inflation and IMF Intervention', Marcus Miller and Lei Zhiang (University of Warwick) used a simple monetary model to show various ways in which the presence of an external agency, such as the IMF, might affect rates of government spending and inflation in an economy which relies heavily on seignorage to finance its deficit. William Perraudin and Pinar Bagci re-presented their 'Do IMF Programmes Work?', a paper which uses a new methodological approach for evaluating IMF programmes, focused on the problem of self-selection bias arising from the non-random sampling of countries that have programmes.

In 'How Private Creditors Fared with Sovereign Lending: Evidence from the 1970-92 Period', Christoph Klingen (Institut fur Bolkswirtschaft - check, Basel) presented a methodology to recover the payment flows between private creditors and debtor countries from World-Debt-Table data. In 'The IMF Supported Programs of Poland and Russia, 1990-94: Principles, Errors, and Results', Stanislaw Gomulka (LSE) suggested that the roles of the IMF and the World Bank in Poland and Russia have been helpful but relatively modest. Mikhail Klimenko (Stanford University) presented 'International Mediation in the Rescheduling of Sovereign Debt', extending some infinite bargaining models to analyse the role of the IMF as an intermediary in the negotiations between private lenders and borrower countries. Finally, Kenneth Kletzer (University of California, Santa Cruz), in 'Sovereign Debt as Intertemporal Barter', written with Brian Wright, described the equilibrium intertemporal exchange relationship that underlies a formal contract for loans between sovereigns. A full report of the workshop will appear in issue two of the GEI newsletter.