By Andrew Walker BBC economics correspondent in Washington

The IMF wants to prevent another debt crisis like Argentina's which came to a head two years ago

Since 1994, a series of international financial crises have done massive economic damage in developing countries.

Mexico was first; then came the Asian crisis, Russia, Brazil, Turkey and most recently Argentina.

Since Mexico, the International Monetary Fund and finance ministries have been working on a whole range of ideas to strengthen what's called the international financial architecture.

Solution

One aim is to prevent crises or - since nobody pretends that anything can prevent them altogether - to make it easier to resolve them when they arrive.

In one area, the last year has at last seen some progress in the question of how to deal with debts owed to private lenders.

When a crisis erupts the country concerned often can't manage the payments that are due.

They don't always default, but it does happen.

Argentina

And even if there is no default, paying up usually puts huge strain on government finances.

Argentina is the most recent example.

Since the crisis came to a head over two years ago, it has made no payments on its debt to private creditors and wants to negotiate new terms with them.

The problem is immensely complex, partly because there are several hundred thousand of them, ranging from professional investment funds to private individual savers, mainly in Italy, Germany and Japan who bought Argentine government bonds.

Simply organising negotiations has been time consuming - although some creditors have complained that Argentina has not even tried to negotiate seriously.

Ideas

One approach to this problem has been to encourage what are called collective action clauses in debt agreements.

They have nothing to do with trade unions or strike action.

The idea is that if enough creditors agree to change the repayment terms, all the others have to accept it.

Collective action clauses could make the renegotiation more manageable.

Damage limitation

They could limit the scope for individual creditors to go to court and demand full repayment - as some have done with Argentina and a number of other countries with severe debt problems.

The benefit of collective action clauses could be to help countries resolve debt problems more quickly.

That could help bring down interest rates and enable them to borrow again if they need to.

Collective action clauses have long been included in developing country debts when the money is raised through the bond markets in London.

But that was not the case in New York, which accounts for a larger share of developing country borrowing.

New tactic

That is now changing.

In the last year or so, IMF officials say the great majority of new emerging market bonds in New York have included collective action clauses.

So the two dominant markets for developing borrowing now make use of these clauses.

The main exception is Germany which accounts for just about 1% of new developing country bonds issued over the last couple of years - although it was more than 10% a few years ago.

Useful

IMF officials acknowledge that it's far too early to declare victory.

For a start, these clauses only cover new debts.

They think it will be a decade or so before the bulk of financial market debts owed by developing nations are covered.

And it is hard to know what will happen in practice if a developing country with a lot of debt covered by collective action clauses were to suffer a crisis.

The IMF's acting managing director Anne Krueger says that what has happened so far are "useful steps".

The stock of debt with collective action clauses is still pretty small, she says.

"I wouldn't give them a great deal of credit yet."

Options

IMF officials did produce an alternative, more comprehensive approach.

They still have it ready to take off the shelves and dust down, if the member countries decide they want it.

It was called the Sovereign Debt Restructuring Mechanism.

The idea is something akin to a bankruptcy procedure, in which a country could ask for its repayment obligations to be suspended while it negotiates with creditors, with any deal covering all debt owed to private lenders.

Present situation

Last year, the IMF's member countries decided not to go ahead with it.

Perhaps they will return to it if there is another developing country financial crisis.

For now though it remains in the deep freeze.