Capital Ideas

By Jeffrey M. Chwieroth. 2009

325 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The right of governments to employ capital controls has always been the official orthodoxy of the International Monetary Fund, and the organization's formal rules providing this right have not changed significantly since the IMF was founded in 1945. But informally, among the staff inside the IMF, these controls became heresy in the 1980s and 1990s, prompting critics to accuse the IMF of indiscriminately encouraging the liberalization of controls and precipitating a wave of financial crises in emerging markets in the late 1990s. In Capital Ideas, Jeffrey Chwieroth explores the inner workings of the IMF to understand how its staff's thinking about capital controls changed so radically. In doing so, he also provides an important case study of how international organizations work and evolve. Drawing on original survey and archival research, extensive interviews, and scholarship from economics, politics, and sociology, Chwieroth traces the evolution of the IMF's approach to capital controls from the 1940s through spring 2009 and the first stages of the subprime credit crisis. He shows that IMF staff vigorously debated the legitimacy of capital controls and that these internal debates eventually changed the organization's behavior--despite the lack of major rule changes. He also shows that the IMF exercised a significant amount of autonomy despite the influence of member states. Normative and behavioral changes in international organizations, Chwieroth concludes, are driven not just by new rules but also by the evolving makeup, beliefs, debates, and strategic agency of their staffs.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb41f865271b8b68920e660e6602719467577b90

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In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Do economists make policies? On the political effects of economics (2014, background): “At the transnational level, economists run organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which set the scope conditions within which national governments act (Babb, 2007; Chwieroth, 2010).”
The Political Economy of the Euro Crisis (2016, background): “For international monetary and financial institutions see for example (Chwieroth, 2009; Copelovitch, 2010a, 2010b; Dreher et al., 2009; Rickard & Caraway, 2014; Vreeland, 2003).”
The Age of the Applied Economist: The Transformation of Economics Since the 1970s (2016, unknown): “On the IMF, see Chwieroth 2010.”
The Emperor Has No Clothes: The Limits of OPEC in the Global Oil Market (2014, background): “See Darden 2009; Legro 2005; Blyth 2002; McNamara 2002; Boiral 2007; and Chwieroth 2009.”
Not Your Grandfather’s IMF: Global Crisis, ‘Productive Incoherence’ and Developmental Policy Space (significantly revised) (2011, background): “While Chwieroth (2010) focuses on informal, ad hoc advocacy by mid-range staff, other analyses focus on the role of organizational leaders and formal rules in propelling change in multilateral institutions [e.g. see Abdelal, 2007, on the OECD and the European Commission]. response to the Asian…”
Club governance and the making of global financial rules (2015, background): “This work is especially developed in the area of financial governance, whether the focus is on central bankers (Helleiner, 1994; Hall 2008) or Treasury officials (Chwieroth, 2010).”