On December 5, 2025, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) cosponsored the workshop, “The Role of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) for Global Stability and Sustainable Economic Transformation.” This convening was co-organized with the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), the Institute for Global Politics at Columbia University, and the Boston University Global Development Policy Center.

The event brought together leading economists, policymakers, and researchers to examine how Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) — a unique tool of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) — can strengthen the global financial architecture and support sustainable development. SDRs are a unique reserve asset that the IMF can create in times of need to help developing countries promote development and withstand economic shocks, without debt or conditions attached. Participants in the event emphasized the exceptional but largely untapped power of SDRs as a tool for global economic stability. Among other issues, participants highlighted the urgency of the need for a new SDR issuance, proposed reforms to the SDR system to allow for repeat or automatic SDR issuances and a more equitable distribution formula, and deliberated over the political economy of achieving such reforms.

Mark Weisbrot, CEPR Co-Director, presented on “The United States, the IMF, and Special Drawing Rights.” His presentation and related paper looked at how SDRs save lives in the developing world. Mortality would have been expected to increase by an estimated two million people in the developing world in 2020 due to the world recession, in addition to the deaths caused by the pandemic. Hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved had the IMF allocated SDRs in March of 2020, when they were proposed by the IMF Managing Director with the support of the Fund and almost all member countries, but the allocation was blocked by the US government and delayed until August of 2021. Weisbrot proposed that IMF governance, including voting shares, must be reformed so that this US veto cannot happen again, and that until these reforms are implemented, the US Congress can continue to pressure the US executive as it did successfully in 2020–2021, to allow regular SDR allocations. 

Andrés Arauz, CEPR Senior Research Fellow, presented “An SDR Playbook for the IMF” (see his presentation here and  his related paper here). The Playbook suggests regular allocations of SDRs can be a mitigator of trade shocks. It also proposes automatic preapproved contingent SDRs as a universal quick response mechanism in scenarios of financial crises, unlike highly selective swap lines. Finally, Arauz proposes a rollback in the IMF’s statistical accounting recommendations to facilitate the fiscal use of SDRs, including for donations and significant debt relief.  

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning American economist, university professor at Columbia University, and CEPR Advisory Board member, said:

Having the global economy function closer to full employment, having a world with more financial stability, having a global financial system that actually works, seems to me to be as much a benefit to the United States as to everyone else. … The SDRs are an important instrument for providing these global public goods, especially in a world where advanced economies are feeling fiscally constrained. … This is an important instrument for a host of global public goods.

Mark Weisbrot served on the Scientific Committee alongside Jeronim Capaldo (UNCTAD), Kevin Gallagher (Boston University GDPC), Martin Guzmán (Columbia University SIPA, IPD), José Antonio Ocampo (Columbia University SIPA), Joseph E. Stiglitz (Columbia University, IPD), and Marina Zucker-Marques (Boston University GDPC).

We are grateful to all partners, speakers, and participants for a day of rigorous debate and forward-looking proposals for a more equitable SDR framework.