Native Pathways or Restructuring Sovereign Debt

Native Pathways: American Indian Culture and Economic Development in the Twentieth Century

Author: Brian Hosmer

Including contributions from historians, anthropologists, and sociologists, Native Pathways offers fresh viewpoints on economic change and cultural identity in twentieth-century Native American communities.

Table of Contents:

	Foreword
1	Rethinking modernity and the discourse of development in American Indian history, an introduction	1
2	Searching for salvation and sovereignty : Blackfeet oil leasing and the reconstruction of the tribe	27
3	Minding their own business : the Kiowa-Comanche-Apache business committee of the early 1900s	52
4	Casino roots : the cultural production of twentieth-century Seminole economic development	66
5	The dawn of a new day? : notes on Indian gaming in southern California	91
6	The devil's in the details : tracing the fingerprints of free trade and its effects on Navajo weavers	112
7	"All we needed was our gardens" : women's work and welfare reform in the reservation economy	133
8	Work and culture in southeastern Alaska : Tlingits and the salmon fisheries	156
9	Five dollars a week to be "regular Indians" : shows, exhibitions, and the economics of Indian dancing, 1880-1930	184
10	Land, labor, and leadership : the political economy of Hualapai community building, 1910-1940	209
11	Working for identity : race, ethnicity, and the market economy in northern California, 1875-1936	238
12	Local knowledge as traditional ecological knowledge : definition and ownership	261
13	"Dollar a day and glad to have it" : work relief on the Wind River Indian Reservation as memory	283
14	Tribal capitalism and Native capitalists : multiple pathways of Native economy	308
15	Conclusion	330

Go to: Leading Organizational Learning or Asset Pricing under Asymmetric Information

Restructuring Sovereign Debt: The Case for Ad Hoc Machinery

Author:

The Western powers established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank after World War II as "permanent machinery" to anchor the Bretton Woods system. When developing countries began experiencing debt problems in the late 1960s, the Paris Club took shape as "ad hoc machinery" to restructure debt from export credit agencies. A decade later the London Club process emerged to handle workouts of commercial bank debt. Restructuring debt in the form of bonds became an issue in the late 1990s in Argentina and several other nations, and the IMF recently proposed a permanent mechanism to deal with that challenge. Restructuring Sovereign Debt explains why ad hoc machinery would function more effectively in the Bretton Woods system.

By describing in detail the origins and operations of the London Club and Paris Club, Lex Rieffel highlights the pragmatism and flexibility associated with ad hoc approaches. He also recalls earlier proposals for creating permanent debt restructuring machinery and the reasons why they were not adopted. Recognizing that the issue of sovereign debt workout is complex, Rieffel has provided a comprehensive and detailed exposition of this important policy issue.

Rieffel's book is an important tool for policymakers and the public, particularly as the global community seeks to resolve the debt problems of countries as diverse as Argentina, Iraq, and Côte d'Ivoire.

About the author
Lex Rieffel brings to this subject forty years of experience with economic development and international finance. In the early 1970s he worked for the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S. AID), including two years in Jakarta, Indonesia. During eighteen years with the U.S. Treasury Department he participated in numerous Paris Club negotiations, served on the staff of the U.S. executive director in the International Monetary fund, and directed the office responsible for issues related to the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union at the beginning of their transitions. At the Institute of International Finance from 1994 to 2001, he was the senior adviser for multilateral policy issues, focusing primarily on private sector involvement in crisis prevention and resolution. Currrently he is teaching, consulting, and writing.

Foreign Affairs

In recent decades, countless governments have borrowed too much abroad and subsequently had to reschedule or scale back their payments to foreign creditors (Argentina being only the most recent in a long list). As a result, there have been various suggestions for streamlining, formalizing, and legalizing the procedures for dealing with sovereign debt problems. But in fact, reasonably orderly procedures have developed on an informal basis as collective experience builds. In this useful reference, Rieffel, for many years an official at the U.S. Treasury, provides a thorough account of the post-1950 evolution of procedures for dealing with sovereign debt owed to both official and private creditors. After critically examining proposals for major institutional overhauls, he vigorously defends the ad hoc, evolutionary approach, while offering his own recommendations for modest improvements on current practices.