This dynamic will test the ability of governments to sustain commitment to an open multilateral trading system, and the manner in which this plays out will have an important impact on future productivity gains. A fourth challenge involves prospective changes in the global exchange rate regime. The international monetary system now incorporates an uncomfortable disparity in the extent to which real effective exchange rates vary across regions. The monetary authorities of the United States and Europe allow considerable variability in their real exchange rates, though they are not indifferent to movements in exchange rates. Japan has somewhat less enthusiasm for flexibility and runs a regime in which it seeks to avoid large swings in the value of their currency. Emerging market economies run a mix of regimes from those that permit significant flexibility to those that run essentially fixed pegs or regimes that seek to contain variations to relatively small degrees around implicit targets for their currencies against the dollar or a basket of the currencies of their major trading partners. The world has lived with this system for some time. But this is not an ideal mix, either for the monetary system as a whole, or for those countries which permit very little variability in their real effective exchange rates, and it’s probably not sustainable over time. It also is not ideal because it limits the extent to which markets work to facilitate adjustment. It creates the risk of larger moves in the major currencies than might otherwise be the case.
Between 2009 and 2012, they doubled their lending to infrastructure projects globally from $ to $ However, is more lending the solution? Despite a doubling of their lending in the last three years, they only contributed 16% of project debt financing volumes globally in 2012. Conceptually, a more efficient way to utilise their financial resources may be in the form of risk mitigants such as credit or risk guarantees. The G30 Working Group on Long-Term Financing has in fact recommended that governments and MDBs should provide risk mitigation instruments to help lower the higher risks involved, especially during the early phases of long-term projects. 2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  This is definitely worth considering. Given their status, MDBs and export credit agencies are seen as very credible counterparties that can provide risk mitigants. It is probably harder for the private sector to play such a role, especially given the long tenor of project finance. I would add that MDBs and export credit agencies already have guarantee products that mitigate credit and political risks for project loans. The issue at hand is how to extend these products to say capital market instruments to “crowd in” participation by a broader group of institutional investors. For instance, the Credit Guarantee & Investment Facility or CGIF, established by the Asian Development Bank and ASEAN+3 nations, recently completed its first guarantee transaction on a 3-year Thai baht bond issuance by Noble Group.