The COVID-19 pandemic has induced new financial strains for emerging market economies (EMEs) and low-income developing countries (LDCs). As a remedy to these strains, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) allocated $650 billion in Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) in August 2021. Since then, recent IMF communications give evidence of the ongoing attempt to revamp SDRs into a mechanism capable of addressing contemporary problems of the global financial system, for instance through a ‘voluntary channeling’ of SDRs from advanced economies to EMEs and LDCs.
分配后：特别提款权制度的作用是什么？
In a new working paper published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Steffen Murau, Tobias Pforr and Fabian Pape assess the potential of the SDR system to address debt-related problems in global finance. They analyze the SDR as a web of interlocking balance sheets whose members can use SDR holdings – the system’s tradable assets – for conversion into usable currency as a perpetual low-interest loan or to make payments to each other.
To assess the role the SDR system can play after the new allocation, like addressing sovereign debt problems of EMEs and LDCs, the authors scrutinize how the SDR system has historically emerged and evolved, how its accounting rules work and how it has been used in practice over recent decades. The working paper uses four different types of sources: audited financial statements of the IMF, the IMF’s financial data query tool, IMF research and staff reports and various central banks reports on how they interact with the IMF and the SDR system.
Though widely perceived as a solution in search of a problem in the post-Bretton Woods era, the authors find the SDR system provides three mechanisms through which IMF members borrow and lend usable currency to each other, with different strings attached: first, transactions by agreement; second, the IMF’s core lending facilities for which the SDR system offers additional resources; and third, IMF-sponsored Trusts which seek to harness the SDR system for development purposes and are the basis for the current idea of ‘voluntary channeling.’
机汇
Read the Working Paper