International monetary systems

International monetary systems are sets of internationally agreed rules, conventions and supporting institutions, that facilitate international trade, cross border investment and generally the reallocation of capital between nation states. They provide means of payment acceptable buyers and sellers of different nationality, including deferred payment. To operate successfully, they need to inspire confidence, to provide sufficient liquidity for fluctuating levels of trade and to provide means by which global imbalances can be corrected. The systems can grow organically as the collective result of numerous individual agreements between international economic factors spread over several decades. Alternatively, they can arise from a single architectural vision as happened at Bretton Woods in 1944

Throughout history, precious metals such as gold and silver have been used for trade, termed bullion, and since early history the coins of various issuers – generally kingdoms and empires – have been traded. The earliest known records of pre - coinage use of bullion for monetary exchange are from Mesopotamia and Egypt, dating from the third millennium BC. Early money took many forms, apart from bullion; for instance bronze Spade money which became common in Zhou dynasty China in the late 7th century BC. At this time, forms of money were also developed in Lydia, Asia minor, from where its use spread to nearby Greek cities and later to the rest of the world

The international monetary system (IMS) refers to the customs, rules, instruments, facilities, and organisations facilitating international (external) payments. Sometimes the IMS is also referred to as an international monetary order or regime.1 IMS can be classified according to the way in
which exchange rates are determined

An IMS is considred good if it fulfils the following two objectiver in an impartial manner:
(i) maximises the flow of foreign trade and foreign investments, and
(ii) leads to an equitable distribution of the gains from trade among the nations of the world.
The evaluation of an IMS is done in terms of adjustment, liquidity and confidence which it manages to weild.

adjustment

It refers to the process by which the balance-of­payment (BoP) crises of the nations of the world (or the member nations) are corrected. A good IMS tries to minimise the cost of BoP and time for adjustment for the nations.

liquidity

It refers to the amount of foreign currency reserves available to settle the BoP crises of the nations. A good IMS maintains as much foreign reserves to mitigate such crises of the nations without any inflationary pressures on the nations.

confidence

It refers to the faith the nations of the world should show that the adjustment mechanism of the IMS is working adequately and that foreign reserves will retain their absolute and relative values. This confidence is based on the transparent knowledge information about the IMS.

The International Monetary Fund - IMF

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an organization of 189 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world. Created in 1945, the IMF is governed by and accountable to the 189 countries that make up its near-global membership.

Why the IMF was created and how it works

The IMF, also known as the Fund, was conceived at a UN conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, United States, in July 1944. The 44 countries at that conference sought to build a framework for economic cooperation to avoid a repetition of the competitive devaluations that had contributed to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The IMF's responsibilities

The IMF's primary purpose is to ensure the stability of the international monetary system—the system of exchange rates and international payments that enables countries (and their citizens) to transact with each other. The Fund's mandate was updated in 2012 to include all macroeconomic and financial sector issues that bear on global stability.

IMF Quotas

When a country joins the IMF, it is assigned an initial quota in the same range as the quotas of existing members of broadly comparable economic size and characteristics. The IMF uses a quota formula to help assess a member’s relative position.

The current quota formula is a weighted average of GDP (weight of 50 percent), openness (30 percent), economic variability (15 percent), and international reserves (5 percent). For this purpose, GDP is measured through a blend of GDP—based on market exchange rates (weight of 60 percent) and on PPP exchange rates (40 percent). The formula also includes a “compression factor” that reduces the dispersion in calculated quota shares across members.

Quotas are denominated in Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), the IMF’s unit of account. The largest member of the IMF is the United States, with a current quota (as of March 2017) of SDR82.99 billion (about US$118 billion), and the smallest member is Tuvalu, with a quota of SDR2.5 million (about US$3.5 million).

The conditions for implementing the quota increases agreed under the 14th General Quota Review were met on January 26, 2016. As a result, the quotas of each of the IMF’s 189 members will increase to a combined SDR477 billion (about US$677 billion) from about SDR238.5 billion (about US$339 billion). As of September 2017, 181 of the 189 members had made their quota payments, accounting for over 99 percent of the total quota increases, and total quotas stood at SDR475 billion (about US$675 billion).

India's Quota

13,114.4 Millions of SDRs accounting to 2.64 percent of total (Votes - 132,609)

Keynes's proposal

The bancor was a supranational currency that John Maynard Keynes and E. F. Schumacherconceptualised in the years 1940–1942 and which the United Kingdom proposed to introduce after World War II. The name was inspired by the French banque or ('bank gold'). This newly created supranational currency would then be used in international trade as a unit of account within a multilateral clearing system—the International Clearing Union—which would also have to be founded

Overview

John Maynard Keynes proposed an explanation for the ineffectiveness of monetary policy to stem the depression, as well as a non-monetary interpretation of the depression, and finally an alternative to a monetary policy for meeting the depression. Keynes believed that in times of heavy unemployment, interest rates could not be lowered by monetary policies. The ability for capital to move between countries seeking the highest interest rate frustrated Keynesian policies. By closer government control of international trade and the movement of funds, Keynesian policy would be more effective in stimulating individual economies.
Bancor would not be an international currency. It would rather be a unit of account used to track international flows of assets and liabilities, which would be conducted through the International Clearing Union. Gold could be exchanged for bancors, but bancors could not be exchanged for gold. Individuals could not hold or trade in bancor. All international trade would be valued and cleared in bancor. Surplus countries with excess bancor assets and deficit countries with excess bancor liabilities would both be charged to provide symmetrical incentives on them to take action to restore balanced trade. In the words of Benn Steil,
"Each item a member country exported would add bancors to its ICB account, and each item it imported would subtract bancors. Limits would be imposed on the amount of bancor a country could accumulate by selling more abroad than it bought, and on the amount of bancor debt it could rack up by buying more than it sold. This was to stop countries building up excessive surpluses or deficits. Each country's limits would be proportional to its share of world trade ... Once initial limits had been breached, deficit countries would be allowed to depreciate, and surplus countries to appreciate, their currencies. This would make deficit country goods cheaper, and surplus country goods more expensive, with the aim of stimulating a rebalancing of trade. Further bancor debit or credit position breaches would trigger mandatory action. For chronic debtors, this would include oligatory currency depreciation, rising interest payments to the ICB Reserve Fund, forced gold sales, and capital export restrictions. For chronic creditors, it would include currency appreciation and payment of a minimum of 5 percent interest on excess credits, rising to 10 percent on larger excess credits, to the ICB's Reserve Fund. Keynes never believed that creditors would actually pay what in effect were fines; rather, he believed they would take the necessary actions ... to avoid them"

Proposed revival

Since the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008 Keynes's proposal has been revived: In a speech delivered in March 2009 entitled Reform the International Monetary System, Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People's Bank of China called Keynes's bancor approach "farsighted" and proposed the adoption of International Monetary Fund (IMF) special drawing rights (SDRs) as a global reserve currency as a response to the financial crisis of 2007–2010. He argued that a national currency was unsuitable as a global reserve currency because of the Triffin dilemma—the difficulty faced by reserve currency issuers in trying to simultaneously achieve their domestic monetary policy goals and meet other countries' demand for reserve currency. A similar analysis can be found in the Report of the United Nation's "Experts on reforms of the international monetary and financial system" as well as in the IMF's study published on 13 April 2010

BIPAs - Bilateral Investment Promotion & Protection Agreement

As part of the Economic Reforms Programme initiated in 1991, the foreign investment policy of the Government of India was liberalised and negotiations undertaken with a number
of countries to enter into Bilateral Investment Promotion & Protection Agreement (BIPAs) in order to promote and protect on reciprocal basis
investment of the investors. Government oflndia have, so far, (as by July 2012) signed BIPAs with 82 countries out of which 72 BIPAs have already come into force and the remaining agreements are in the process of being enforced.1 7 In addition, agreements have also been finalised and/or being negotiated with a number of other countries.
The objective of the BIPA is to promote and protect the interests of investors of either country in the territory of other country. Such agreements increase the comfort level of the investors by assuring a minimum standard of treatment in all matters and provides for justifiability of disputes with the host country {it should be noted here that India is not a member of the World Bank group's body, the ICSID, serving the same purpose. BIPA is India's version. While the former is a multilateral body, the latter is a bilateral one).

The Asian Development Bank (ADB)

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is a regional development bank established on 19 December 1966, which is headquartered in the Ortigas Center located in Mandaluyong, Metro Manila, Philippines. The company also maintains 31 field offices around the world to promote social and economic development in Asia. The bank admits the members of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP, formerly the Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East or ECAFE) and non-regional developed countries. From 31 members at its establishment, ADB now has 67 members, of which 48 are from within Asia and the Pacific and 19 outside. The ADB was modeled closely on the World Bank, and has a similar weighted voting system where votes are distributed in proportion with members' capital subscriptions. ADB releases an annual report that summarizes its operations, budget and other materials for review by the public. The ADB-Japan Scholarship Program (ADB-JSP) enrolls about 300 students annually in academic institutions located in 10 countries within the Region. Upon completion of their study programs, scholars are expected to contribute to the economic and social development of their home countries. ADB is an official United Nations Observer.
As of 31 December 2016, Japan and United States hold the largest proportion of shares at 15.607%. China holds 6.444%, India holds 6.331%, and Australia holds 5.786%

OECD - Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD); French: Organisation de coopération et de développement économiques, OCDE) is an intergovernmental economic organisation with 35 member countries, founded in 1960 to stimulate economic progress and world trade. It is a forum of countries describing themselves as committed to democracy and the market economy, providing a platform to compare policy experiences, seeking answers to common problems, identify good practices and coordinate domestic and international policies of its members. Most OECD members are high-income economies with a very high Human Development Index (HDI) and are regarded as developed countries. OECD is an official United Nations Observer.
In 1948, the OECD originated as the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC), led by Robert Marjolin of France, to help administer the Marshall Plan (which was rejected by the Soviet Union and its satellite states). This would be achieved by allocating American financial aid and implementing economic programs for the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. (Similar reconstruction aid was sent to the war-torn Republic of China and post-war Korea, but not under the name "Marshall Plan".)
In 1961, the OEEC was reformed into the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development by the Convention on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and membership was extended to non-European states.
The OECD's headquarters are at the Château de la Muette in Paris, France. The OECD is funded by contributions from member states at varying rates,and had a total budget of €363 million in 2015.

Bilateral and Regional Cooperation

India has always stood for an open, equitable, predictable, non-discriminatory and rule-based international trading system. Considering that regional and bilateral trade and economic cooperation agreements serve as building blocks towards achieving the multilateral trade liberalisation objective, India is actively engaging in regional and bilateral negotiations with her trading partner countries/blocs to diversify and expand the markets for its exports. Some of the recent developments related to major Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) are the following:
(i) lndia-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA)
(ii) India-Malaysia Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA)
(iii) lndia-ASEAN Trade in Goods Agreement
(iv) India-EU Trade and Investment Agreement Negotiations
(v) India-European Free Trade Association (EFTA)
(vi) BTIA (Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland)
(vii) India-New Zealand FTA/CECA
(viii) India-Australia CECA

The New Development Bank (NDB) or BRICS Development Bank

The New Development Bank (NDB), formerly referred to as the BRICS Development Bank, is a multilateral development bank established by the BRICS states (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). According to the Agreement on the NDB, "the Bank shall support public or private projects through loans, guarantees, equity participation and other financial instruments." Moreover, the NDB "shall cooperate with international organizations and other financial entities, and provide technical assistance for projects to be supported by the Bank."
The initial authorized capital of the bank is $100 bln divided into 1 mln shares having a par value of $100,000 each. The initial subscribed capital of the NDB is $50 bln divided into paid-in shares ($10 bln) and callable shares ($40 bln). The initial subscribed capital of the bank was equally distributed among the founding members. The Agreement on the NDB specifies that the voting power of each member will be equal to the number of its subscribed shares in the capital stock of the bank.

NDB is currently headquartered in Oriental Financial Centre in Shanghai.The first regional office of the NDB will be opened in Johannesburg, South Africa

Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank - AIIB

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is a multilateral development bank that aims to support the building of infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region. The bank currently has 56 member states while another 24 are prospective members for a total of 80 approved members and was proposed as an initiative by the government of China.The initiative gained support from 37 regional and 20 non-regional Prospective Founding Members (PFM), all of which have signed the Articles of Agreement that form the legal basis for the bank. The bank started operation after the agreement entered into force on 25 December 2015, after ratifications were received from 10 member states holding a total number of 50% of the initial subscriptions of the Authorized Capital Stock. Major economies that are not members include Japan and the United States.
The United Nations has addressed the launch of AIIB as having potential for "scaling up financing for sustainable development" for the concern of global economic governance. The capital of the bank is $100 billion, equivalent to  2⁄3 of the capital of the Asian Development Bank and about half that of the World Bank.
The bank was proposed by China in 2013 and the initiative was launched at a ceremony in Beijing in October 2014