Applying the Lessons of Asia: The IMF's Crisis Management Strategy following the Global Financial Crisis

ABSTRACT

The paper reviews the International Monetary Fund's (IMF's) non-concessional lending programs following the global financial crisis, with a view to understanding how the IMF applied the lessons of the Asian crisis in designing its approach to crisis management. For this purpose, the paper focuses on the 2008 programs in Hungary, Iceland, Latvia and Ukraine – the first of its kind since the early 2000s – and compares them with the 1997 programs in Indonesia, Korea and Thailand. Our analysis finds the European programs better funded and their structural conditionality more focused. Other than these, the overall thrust of the programs was similar: fiscal and monetary tightening, coupled with banking reforms. The real difference was not so much about content but about philosophy. Relative to the Asian programs, the European programs were characterized by more emphasis on ownership, greater collaboration among stakeholders, more realistic assumptions and greater transparency about the risks and the logic of policy actions, and more built-in flexibility of targets and policy options. This approach to crisis management incorporated the changes that had been made since the Asian crisis in the IMF's policies and procedures to manage capital account crises more effectively.