This edition of the newsletter contains a paper on Global Economic Institutions by Sarah Hogg (Baroness Hogg), Chairman of London Economics. It also reports on work in the GEI Programme on Financial Crises.

Sarah Hogg’s paper is about the general need for effective international institutions and the particular implications for the World Trade Organisation. Baroness Hogg was Prime Minister John Major’s closest adviser on such international economic issues as trade negotiations and the creation of the World Trade Organisation; she played a leading role in the development of the UK’s strategy for securing a conclusion to the Uruguay round negotiations. In this paper she raises important questions about the efficacy of the WTO’s disputes settlement procedure, and about the relationship between national competition policies and trade disputes.

The second paper in this issue of the GEI Newsletter contains an article by David Vines on Lessons of the Asian Financial Crises. It presents four sets of lessons: - about the design of policy in economies which have newly liberalised financial markets, about what we have learned about the causes of crises in such economies, about crisis resolution, and about the roles for global economic institutions.

The GEI Programme has participated in the hosting of three meetings on Financial Crises in the past twelve months. The first of these meetings was a joint ESRC-CEPR conference on ‘The Origins and Management of Financial Crises’, in Cambridge on 11/12 July 1997, and in London, on 14 July 1997. A report of this conference is presented as the third article in this Newsletter and can be found on page 11.