The International Monetary Fund under Constraint: Legitimacy of its Crisis Management

The International Monetary Fund under Constraint exposes a legal dilemma facing the IMF as it tackles international crisis management. Using the Asian crisis - and more particularly economic and political events in Indonesia - as an example, this volume examines whether the Fund’s activities in Asia were legally justified. The results of this analysis lead to the following question: What future role can the IMF play in the international financial architecture? The principles of international law and the legal foundations of the Fund are used to analyse the reform suggestions of economic experts and to find a suitable concept for future IMF involvement in financial crises and crises prevention. This volume is a long-overdue legal analysis of IMF activities. It presents the combination of law and economics which was originally at the heart of the IMF but which so far has been ignored in today’s reform discussion. About the author: Eva Riesenhuber, a law graduate of the University of Frankfurt, specialized in international law at the University of Paris where she graduated with a Maitrise. For the research of this book she lived in Indonesia and Australia in 1998-1999, visited the IMF headquarters in Washington DC and spent a month at the Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt. She is currently pursuing the preparation of her bar examination at the Court of Appeal, Berlin.