The International Monetary Fund is being pressed to step up its efforts to avert debt crises in emerging market economies, including closer surveillance of countries' economic rate policies and debt profiles to provide early warnings.

But there have been more mixed reviews for more radical proposal now being discussed by the IMF to make emerging markets less vulnerable by linking debt payments to a country's gross domestic product. Economists tend to see growth-indexed debt as a sensible way to reduce a country's vulnerability to external shocks, to insure against low growth in return for slightly higher interest payments in good times.