Managing Director's closing press conference: Camdessus reports "unanimous support" for fight against poverty, defends Russian program

• Pages: 330-332

Page 330

Let me tell you the things that are foremost in my mind as we come to the end of the Annual Meetings. First are the heartening comments we have heard about our actions during the past year and the encouraging suggestions about what remains to be done.

An important contribution of these Annual Meetings to the architecture discussion was to find the proper rationale or foundation for the social pillar we wanted to add to the new architecture. Angel Gurría [Secretary of Finance and Public Credit for Mexico] formulated this rationale particularly well when he said that "poverty is the ultimate systemic threat." The architecture of the new globalized economic and financial world will not be solid if we are not able to better integrate poverty-reduction concerns into the heart of our strategies. We have had this concern in mind for a long time, but never has it been so strongly put to us, and never, at least in the IMF, have we had such unanimous support for putting poverty reduction at the heart of our actions, of our surveillance, of our facilities.

For us, an extremely encouraging vote of confidence has come from people "putting their money where their mouth is." More than 90 countries have contributed money-in addition to our own contributions throughPage 331 our off-market transactions of gold-to complete the financing of our facilities, making the successor to the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility a permanent instrument and the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, as far as the IMF is concerned, fully financed. Of the 91 countries, 58 are developing countries, several of which had benefited from ESAF in the past and consider it a great thing to help countries poorer than themselves benefit from this kind of IMF support.

This leads me to think that we must be on the right track. The so-called bitter IMF medicine has been tried on people, but these people found it good and are ready to find money to help other people in the world benefit from this kind of medicine.

We enter here into a new phase of our working together with the World Bank-an exciting time indeed. The next stage is the need to complement aid efficiently with trade.

Question: What is the status of the discussion on amending the Articles of Agreement with regard to the capital account, which was a theme of the Hong Kong SAR Annual Meetings in October 1997? Camdessus: I am a bit impatient at the slow progress in this area since the inspiring pledges made...