With the US and the global economy slowing down, these improvements in what Washington bureaucrats grandly refer to as the international financial architecture now face their first important test. Are they sufficiently robust to ensure that millions will not have to live in fear of what former US treasury secretary Lawrence Summers calls "typhoons of man's own making"?

There can be no denying the extensive nature of the reforms to exchange rate regimes, debt management and banking systems. Nor, again, of the greater support that is now available from the international financial institutions and regulatory bodies for the restructuring of banking systems. Standards and codes have proliferated on everything from fiscal policy and banking supervision to accountancy and audit. Much of this standard setting has been designed to enhance transparency.

As for crisis resolution, much has been learned in the past three years about how to improve co-operation between governments and private-sector creditors. In all, a serious effort has been made to build a system that encourages a more stable flow of capital to emerging market economies. Yet there are nagging doubts about what might happen now.

The biggest turns on the way US economic growth, which has given the emerging market economies a wonderful opportunity to pull themselves out of the trough, is suddenly slowing before the task of financial restructuring is anywhere near complete. Macro-economic recovery in the emerging market economies has not been adequately complemented by micro-economic reform.

At the same time, the global economic slowdown has coincided with a higher oil price. With notable exceptions such as resource-rich Russia, this has hit the external account of emerging market economies.

Moreover, the collapse of stock prices on the technology-oriented Nasdaq exchange in the US has pulled down stock prices in many emerging markets - especially those in Asia where economies are vulnerable to the slowdown in US high-tech business investment.

The contagion from Nasdaq increases potential financial distress. So, too, does the waning appetite for risk demonstrated by creditors across the world.

In Asia, corporate balance sheets remain weak. The spectacular macro-economic turnround in South Korea, for example, distracted attention from the failure to restructure in timely fashion. This was highlighted by the recent insolvency of Daewoo Motors. Official data revealed last August that debt-equity ratios in the big Korean conglomerates, the chaebol, were generally above the governments's target of 200 per cent at end-1999.

So while gross equity issuance increased in emerging market economies to $30bn in the first three quarters of 2000 from $22bn in the whole of 1999, there is still a shortage of equity in many countries. And despite the fact that the composition of capital inflows is more healthy, with a growing emphasis on foreign direct investment rather than hot money inflows, equity still offers a very threadbare safety net against financial instability.

This is particularly true in those countries where the family-run business remains the dominant corporate model and excessive borrowing is seen as a means of maintaining family control. In much of Asia that desire to retain control is reinforced by economic nationalism.

So foreign capital has done less to help restore the fortunes of ailing banks than it might have done - witness the failure of some leading international banks to establish a stronger bridgehead in countries such as South Korea, despite strenuous efforts to break in. Nor have foreigners been able to help raise standards of corporate governance as much as might have been hoped.

Banking sectors in Asia remain undercapitalised and laden with bad debts. According to World Bank estimates published last September, non-performing loans other than those already transferred to the public sector were more than 50 per cent in Indonesia and 30 per cent in Thailand.

Nor is financial fragility purely an Asian problem, as the plight of the Turkish banking system underlines. Meantime, there remains another unresolved problem, which concerns the exchange rate regime.

There is a widely-held view that the Asian crisis discredited adjustable peg exchange rate systems. Turkey's reliance on a soft peg may put a further nail in that particular coffin.

Note, though, that whatever the disadvantages of soft currency pegs, countries such as Argentina that opted for a super-hard peg in the form of a currency board have not been immune from crisis.

George Soros, the semi-retired hedge fund billionaire who bounced the UK out of the European exchange rate mechanism, argues that the only real solution to currency market instability is the abolition of national currencies. Yet he acknowledges that this is, at best, a very long-run solution.

Others might argue against him that the gold standard came close to offering the equivalent of a global currency in the 19th century. Yet banking crises in the US and Europe were as frequent then as they are now in the modern developing world.

It is possible that the successful stabilisation of exchange rates simply transfers instability to domestic securities and banking markets. The European single currency offers an interesting testing ground for that thesis.

What are the risks of another Asian-style crisis? Clearly they have been significantly reduced in Asia itself, where the developing countries are in current account surplus if India is excluded. They are thus exporting capital to the rest of the world and must, by definition, be less vulnerable to panicky withdrawals of funds than when they were net capital importers, as in 1997-98.

In the aftermath of the crisis greater prudence has been imposed on borrowers all across the emerging market world thanks to tougher banking supervision and market discipline. And the hedge funds are now a less powerful force in global markets. There are fewer rigid exchange rate pegs and stubborn central bankers to provide attractive targets for speculative attack.

The problem is rather that the speed of macro-economic recovery in Asia bred complacency over the need to strengthen banking systems and corporate balance sheets. So with the world's largest economy slowing and the world's second-largest economy - Japan - looking dangerously fragile, the likelihood of further financial weakness being exposed this year is too high for comfort.

The efforts of the international community to protect the developing world from financial crises will not have been wasted. Important gains have been achieved. But we may soon find out just how much more remains to be done to build a financial framework that is demonstrably robust.