IMF Conference on Global Linkages
Call for Papers
Note: Deadline has expired
last updated April 3, 2002

The International Monetary Fund is organizing a conference on “Global Linkages” in Washington, D.C. on March 13-14, 2003, to be preceded by a pre-conference on April 26, 2002. Research papers are being sought that explore how economic linkages across countries have changed in recent years and what implications these changes have for policy makers in developed and emerging markets.

Under the heading of “Global Linkages,” suggested topics include the following:

• What are the linkages by which country- and region-specific shocks are transmitted globally? Have these linkages become more important in recent years or have the underlying shocks themselves become more global?



• How has the balance shifted among cross-country linkages between real linkages (international trade) and financial linkages (capital flows)?



• To what extent does the rise in comovement of real and financial series across countries reflect a long term trend towards closer integration, a process that can be explained from fundamentals, and to what extent does it reflect short term factors? In particular, has there been a rise in financial linkages that cannot be explained in terms of real (e.g. trade liberalization) and financial shocks (e.g. capital account liberalization)?



• What is the role of firms (e.g. multinationals, FDI, mutual funds) versus individuals (e.g. falling transaction and information costs in portfolio diversification) in promoting the change in cross-border linkages?



• What role have government policies played in the evolution of cross-border linkages and what policies should governments pursue going forward? Are short and medium-run isolation strategies effective, given the changing nature of cross-country linkages? Do exchange rate regimes interact with real and financial linkages? Are there benefits to diversification across industries and commodities? Should policy coordination among the G-3 be enhanced to promote exchange rate stability and what would be the implications for emerging markets?

An overarching goal of the conference is to generate a quantitative assessment of how important different cross-country linkages are in practice, by country and industry. Research papers should therefore have an empirical focus and use new datasets in addition to the latest econometric techniques. Papers with an emphasis on disaggregated data, such as firm-level, industry-level, or transactions-based data are especially desirable, though new approaches using macroeconomic time-series will also be considered.

Paper proposals (1000 words) should be submitted to rbrooks2@imf.org by February 28, 2002. Proposals should be as explanatory and comprehensive as possible and include the affiliation of all authors and the questions to be examined. Special focus should be placed on the empirical techniques to be used and the description of the data. If available, preliminary drafts reflecting new, original work may also be submitted for consideration. The conference will feature a majority of papers by outside economists, as well as a few by IMF staff.

Prospective contributors will be invited to a pre-conference on April 26, 2002 in Washington, D.C. where they will make a 20 minute presentation of their proposal. The purpose of this pre-conference is to facilitate an exchange of ideas among researchers and to ensure that papers are mutually complementary. A subset of the conference papers is likely to be published as a symposium in The Review of Economics and Statistics, subject to meeting any requirements of the organizing committee and the journal’s standard process for review. In addition, all papers and datasets will be posted on a “Global Linkages” website following the conference.

Organizing Committee: