A high-level seminar to discuss possible reforms in the international monetary system to make it more capable of promoting greater global monetary and financial stability will be held Wednesday during the annual governors' meeting of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Hanoi, Vietnam.

The seminar will look into recent warnings that an international monetary system dominated still by the US dollar-and supported by a few other currencies like the euro, the UK pound, and the Japanese yen-may no longer reflect current economic realities.

Experts have pointed out that the world's leading economies now include high-growth China, Brazil, and India while the most advanced economies are saddled with slow growth and high government debt.

ADB president Haruhiko Kuroda said Tuesday that the monetary and financial reforms to be discussed at the meeting are "critical to helping Asia achieve strong and sustainable growth for all."

"We have yet to fix the current international monetary system - which fails to address issues such as large and volatile capital flows, undue exchange rate pressures, and disruptions in providing sufficient global liquidity in times of market distress," Mr Kuroda said.

The seminar, officially called "Joint ADB-IMF-Japanese ASEAN+3 Co-chair-French G20 Presidency High-Level Panel on Reforming the International Monetary System," is organized by ADB, France as the chair of the G20 group of leading emerging and advanced economies, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and Japan's Ministry of Finance.

An economically strong, export-dependent Asia that is now experiencing a flood of inward capital flows will be probed by a panel that will be led by France's Finance Minister Christine Lagarde and her Japanese counterpart, Yoshihiko Noda.

Joining them will be India's Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Indonesia's Finance Minister Agus D.W. Martowardojo, IMF Deputy Managing Director Naoyuki Shinohara, and Mr Kuroda.

The ADB governors' meeting in Hanoi, set to run until May 6, will look into major challenges confronting the Asia Pacific Region including soaring food and fuel prices that further hurt the region's nearly two billion people struggling on less than $2 a day and "complicating economic and monetary policymaking."

The situation is exacerbated by floods and earthquakes that dislocate economies and people's lives in the region.

At a news conference Tuesday, Mr Kuroda pointed to the current "dramatic times" characterized by rising food and oil prices stoked by the "unexpected upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa, while the devastating earthquake and tsunami in Japan have created further global unease."

"Inflation will need to be carefully managed using a mix of policy measures - especially given the harder impact of inflation on the poor, which in Asia still number in the hundreds of millions," the ADB president said.

Asia and the Pacific now accounts for around a quarter of global economic output but this could soar to around 50 percent by 2050, according to findings of a study that ADB will present at the Hanoi meeting.

By 2050, the region will account for over half the world's population, increasingly flooding into the region's cities, using an ever-larger portion of the world's finite resources, and generate a bigger carbon footprint, according to the ADB study.