This edition of the newsletter describes recent work in the GEI Programme on Financial Crises. Understandably, the GEI Programme has continued to be active in furthering work on this subject. The newsletter also contains a report on a workshop on the theme of International Competition Policy held at Sussex University.

We begin on page 2 with a transcription of a roundtable discussion which took place at the conclusion of a conference on "World Capital Markets and Financial Crises", held at the University of Warwick on 24-25 July. Contributions were made by British and American academics, by a senior official at the Bank for International Settlements, and by Charles Goodhart, who is a member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee. The discussion produced a remarkably comprehensive review of current thinking about the crisis - which is why we report it in full here. The newsletter continues with a detailed report on a conference on "Financial Crises: Contagion and Market Volatility" held in London on the 8/9 May. Papers given at the conference were concerned both with explanations for the onset of crisis and with the contagion effects which led to crises being transmitted throughout the region, spreading out from Thailand.

Papers from both the May and July conferences are being collected together in a book to be published by Cambridge University Press, and edited by Pierre Richard Agenor (World Bank), Marcus Miller (Warwick University), David Vines (Oxford University), and Axel Weber (Universität Bonn). The title of this book will be "The Asian Financial Crisis: Causes, Contagion and Consequences". Details will be given in later editions of this 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 16.)

On pages 15 and 16 of the newsletter there is a report on a workshop held on 28-29th May at the Sussex European Institute on the theme of International Competition Policy. At the meeting the findings of the Sussex GEI project on this topic were presented. Participants discussed whether there is a need for some form of supra-nation control of anti-competitive behaviour which has an international dimension, and also considered the more limited objective of the international regulation of national competition policies. Legal as well as economic aspects of these questions were examined. The meeting was noteworthy for the wide range of private sector participants who were involved in the discussion. In due course the findings of the Sussex GEI project will be written up in a book, details of which will be given in later editions of this newsletter.