His trip is also significant because his itinerary includes Japan, where a tentative economic recovery is taking shape after a decade of stagnation, and China, which is trying to reign in an overheating economy and stave off pressure to free its currency.

The respected former Spanish finance and economy minister, who took over as managing director of the International Monetary Fund this month for a five-year term, will be in Tokyo June 21-22 and in Beijing the following two days.

He will also visit Southeast Asia's financial hub Singapore on June 25 and the next day go to Vietnam, which is facing an uphill task of qualifying this year as a member of the World Trade Organization.

Rato will meet with leaders and senior government officials of these countries and receive feedback on the IMF's effectiveness in dealing with challenges of the global economy, an IMF statement said.

"It is rather encouraging that his first official trip is to Asia, which is very important, because in the past, my perception was that the IMF was more interested in Europe and America than affairs in Asia," said Edward Lincoln, a Washington-based senior fellow at the influential Council on Foreign Relations.

There is still considerable frustration in East Asia over mistakes the IMF made in containing the region's worst financial crisis in 1997-98, he said.

"Probably many people will still agree that the IMF needs to understand more on how Asian economies operate," said Lincoln, an expert on the Japanese economy and US economic relations with Japan and Asia.

Rato has expressed his desire for Asia to enhance structural reforms and keep markets open.

In Japan, he is expected to advise the government not to change monetary policy, Lincoln said.

Japan, the world's second largest economy, has kept interest rates very low and expanded money supply to haul the economy out of deflation and induce growth, which the IMF forecast would hit 3.4 percent this year.

"The crisis seems to be levelling off but there's not much evidence of a return to positive price increases," Lincoln said.

In China, other analysts said, Rato might find it difficult convincing Beijing to adopt a flexibile exchange rate policy as the world's most populous nation took steps to contain runaway economic growth.

The IMF has been urging China for sometime to adopt a flexible exchange rate regime to help reflect market conditions. The yuan currency has been pegged at 8.3 to the dollar for a decade.

Beijing has been accused by the United States, which suffered a trade deficit of 124 billion US dollars with China last year, of keeping its currency artificially low to give its exporters an unfair advantage.

A misaligned yuan could have adverse effects on China's 1.3 billion people as well as the global economy and financial markets, analysts warned.

"Every major international economic crisis of the past 15 years -- save Brazil's crisis in 2002 -- has been rooted in an exchange rate that remained too fixed for too long," said Kenneth Rogoff, professor of economics at Harvard University.

The IMF, with only some 150 billion dollars in immediate resources, may not have enough money available to bail out China if it plunged into currency turmoil, Rogoff warned in a report in Foreign Policy, a US publication.