The Legalization of the International Monetary Fund: Exchange Rate Surveillance over China

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Master's Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: International Organisations, grade: 1, 0, LMU Munich (Geschwister Scholl Institute for Political Sciences), language: English, abstract: Against the backdrop of the renminbi issue, this paper retraces the unique trajectory of the international law (IL) on exchange rates - from the lawlessness of the gold standard to a highly regulated system under Bretton Woods and back to the obscure arrangement that has prevailed ever since the Second Amendment of the IMF's Articles of Agreement. By employing the concept of legalization, it argues that international monetary stability is a public good which, as a collective action problem, provides strong incentives for cooperation. However, the analysis of the IMF's bilateral surveillance regime reveals that after the Second Amendment hard legalization no longer served the interests of the IMF membership, while the costs of hard legal rules tipped the scale in favour of soft commitments. Specifically, the paper finds that exchange rates are subject to high uncertainty costs stemming from measurement difficulties, complexity, goal incongruence and subjectivity, as well as sover-eignty costs due to reputational damage, distributional impact and loss of monetary power.