Editorial

 This edition of the Newsletter begins with an article by Jan Aart Scholte about the relationships between the IMF and Civil Society. “Dialogues” between Global Economic Institutions and NGOs and other organisations are on the increase. There are some who see these dialogues as impeding, or at least cluttering up, the work of these organisations, and as likely to muddle their governance and accountability. This piece, which arises out of work done by Scholte and colleagues in the GEI Programme, presents a forceful statement of the opposing point of view.

On page six there is a short appreciation of Professor Susan Strange, and information on how to obtain the book Mad Money which she wrote as part of the GEI Programme.

Then on page seven there is a detailed report on a conference on “World Capital Markets and Financial Crises”, held at the University of Warwick on 24-25 July. (The edited transcript of the roundtable discussion at this conference was contained in the last edition of the Newsletter.) Papers given at the conference were concerned with explanations for the onset of crisis, with the contagion effects which led to crises being transmitted throughout the region, and with policy questions relating to crisis prevention and crisis resolution. Papers from this conference, together with those from a previous conference held in London in May, are being collected together in a book called The Asian Financial Crisis: Causes, Contagion and Consequences, to be published in July by Cambridge University Press, which has been edited by Pierre Richard Agenor (World Bank), Marcus Miller (Warwick University), David Vines (Oxford University), and Axel Weber (Goethe Universitaet, Frankfurt am Main). Full details will be given in the next edition of the newsletter. This will be the second in a series of books produced by the Global Economic Institutions Programme and published by CUP. (An advertisement for the first GEI book, called Europe, East Asia and APEC: A Shared Global Agenda can be found on page five below.)