Introduction

IN JUNE 1943, the International Finance Section at pub- lished the first of its Essays in International Finance. It was written by Friedrich A. Lutz and compared the Keynes and White plans for organizing the international monetary system after the Second World War. Soon thereaf- ter, the Section published three more Essays concerned with postwar mone- tary problems, including Ragnar Nurkse's celebrated paper, Conditions of International Monetary Equilibrium. In April 1993, the International Finance Section celebrated the fiftieth birth- day of its Essays by convening a conference at Princeton. The conference reviewed recent research on international monetary issues but also examined policy problems that call for more research. Five sessions were devoted to surveys and assessments of recent research, two panels examined key policy problems, and Paul Krugman concluded the conference with a lecture in which he asked what we know and need to know about the international monetary system. The papers and panelists' presentations are published in this volume. The first of the five sessions on recent research was concerned with exchange- rate behavior and the evolution of exchange-rate arrangements. The second examined recent work on the dynamics of current-account adjustment. The third examined research on capital mobility and international debt. The fourth session dealt with stabilization and liberalization in open economies. The fifth was devoted to research on international policy coordination and on monetary unification. There were discussants at each session, but their comments are not published in this book, because the conference papers have been revised extensively to take account of the discussants' comments. The first of the two panel discussions, led by Charles Kindleberger, debated the case for reform- ing the exchange-rate regime. The second panel, led by Paul Volcker, exam- ined the outlook for stabilization and reform in the countries of Central Europe and the former Soviet Union. The International Finance Section was founded in 1929 as an affiliate of the Department of . It was funded initially by a gift in memory of James Theodore Walker, who died in an airplane accident two days after grad- uating from Princeton in 1927. The income from that gift has been used to finance the Walker Professorship of Economics and International Finance, as well as the work of the International Finance Section. The first Walker Pro- fessor, Edwin Kemmerer, also served as the first director of the Section. The research facilities of the Section were greatly strengthened by the collection of books and documents donated by Benjamin Strong, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The Section's present offices were provided by a generous grant from Merrill Lynch & Company. Xiv INTRODUCTION In its early years, the Section financed and published research by faculty and staff at Princeton, including works by Frank Graham, , and Richard Lester. The first few Essays were likewise written by economists associated with the Section. (Ragnar Nurkse was affiliated with the secretariat of the League of Nations, which had its home in Princeton during the Second World War.) In the late 1940s, however, the Section started to publish Essays by other economists, including Sir Roy Harrod, Raymond Vernon, , and James Meade. In 1950, moreover, the Section began to publish a new series, Princeton Studies in International Finance, and in 1995, it intro- duced a third, Special Papers in International Economics.' Frank Graham became Walker Professor in 1945, followed by in 1950, but they did not wish to assume the directorship of the Section. That position was filled by Gardner Patterson, who served from 1949 to 1958, and by Lester Chandler, who served from 1958 to 1960. The two positions were reunited in 1960, when became Walker Professor, and I have held both of them since 1971. The Section continues to support research by faculty and students at Princeton and has sponsored many conferences and meetings, including those of the "Bellagio Group" of officials and academics, which met periodically for ten years, starting in 1964. The Section is best known for its publications, however, having issued 190 Essays, 74 Studies, and 18 Special Papers as of the end of 1993. Coincidentally, the conference on which this volume is based took place exactly twenty years after a similar conference sponsored by the Section, al- though the scope of the earlier conference was wider in one way and narrower in another.2 It dealt with trade and trade policy, as well as monetary issues, but concentrated on empirical research, whereas the papers in this volume deal also with theoretical work. It is instructive, however, to compare the ways in which the two sets of conference papers cover common ground. Both conferences heard papers on the roles of price and income changes in current-account adjustment, but the paper presented in 1973 devoted much attention to the sizes of the long-run price and income effects, whereas the paper presented in 1993 focused far more heavily on the short-run price effects and on factors affecting the pass-through of exchange-rate changes into import prices. Both conferences heard papers on capital mobility, but the 1973 paper was largely concerned with the modeling of capital flows, whereas the 1993

1 A complete list of the Section's publications and a longer of the Section itself can be found in another volume, The International Monetary System: Highlights from Fifty Years of Princeton's Essays in International Finance (Boulder, Colo., Westview Press, 1993), which was published on the eve of the conference to which this volume is devoted. It contains a dozen Essays chosen by a panel of economists who were asked to select those Essays that have had "a lasting impact on the way we think about the international monetary system." 2 The papers presented at that conference appeared in International Trade and Finance: Fron- tiers for Research (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975). INTRODUCTION XV paper made no use whatsoever of capital-flow data; it focused instead on indirect ways to measure capital mobility, using tests suggested by arbitrage conditions and by recent theoretical work on the implications of risk pooling and intertemporal optimization. The earlier conference volume contained two papers that used large, multi- country models to analyze balance-of-payments adjustment under floating and pegged exchange rates, and it included a paper on reserves and liquidity, but there are no such papers in this volume. Conversely, this volume contains papers on exchange-rate behavior, intertemporal models of the current ac- count, stabilization and reform in developing countries, the resolution of the international debt crisis, experience with international policy coordination, and the of monetary union, but there were no such papers in the earlier volume. Clearly, the world has changed greatly, and so has our research agenda. There is another difference between the two volumes. All of the papers in the earlier volume surveyed and synthesized large bodies of research, and some of the papers in this volume do that once again. The paper by Mark Taylor, for example, reviews research on exchange-rate behavior under var- ious exchange-rate regimes, and the paper by Peter Hooper and Jaime Mar- quez reviews research on the roles of exchange rates and prices in the international adjustment process, although it reports original research as well. But several papers break new ground. Barry Eichengreen seeks to explain why countries switch between pegged and floating exchange rates. Michael Bruno provides a general framework for comparing experience across countries with inflation, growth, and stabilization. Charles Goodhart examines the political and economic obstacles to monetary union. I tried at first to insist that all of the authors produce comprehensive survey papers, but some of them fought for more freedom, and I am glad that I gave in. Several people worked hard on this book. Giuseppe Bertola, assistant direc- tor of the International Finance Section, helped to plan the conference and worked closely with several authors on the revisions of their papers. Margaret Riccardi, the Section's own editor, edited all of the papers and prepared the manuscript for publication. Lillian Spais managed the flow of papers and people before, during, and after the conference. I am deeply grateful to them. I am likewise grateful to the authors of this book. They were remarkably attentive to deadlines and equally attentive to the comments and suggestions made by me and their discussants. Peter B. Kenen