Enhancing the Learning Culture

• Author: Jean-Claude Milleron
• Position: French Executive Director
• Pages: 48-49

Page 48

One of the major purposes of the IEO is to enhance the "learning culture" of the IMF. Those who laid the foundations of the IEO- and I was one of them-obviously had in mind not only IMF staff and management but also the Executive Directors themselves, whose learning culture stood to be improved in many areas.

In this context, it makes sense for a former IMF Executive Director to try to answer the following question candidly: Would I, as a member of the Board, have been better equipped if the IEO's analysis of today had been available to me? My answer is definitely affirmative, but with two caveats. First, the information available to the IEO today is often much broader than the information that was available to the Board in the past when it was making difficult decisions. Second, the IEO is able to analyze those decisions-which were often made under extreme pressure-with the benefit of hindsight. Thus, my answer to this question must be taken with a grain of salt.

Concepts

The first thing one must look at is what can be called the "conceptual framework" of the IEO's work. For the IMF Executive Board, clear definitions-including of such a framework-agreed upon in advance by its members are a prerequisite for careful and consistent decision making and comparative cross-sectional analysis. For instance, the IEO's remarkable effort to define what "prolonged use of IMF resources" really means should be an excellent point of departure for many board decisions related to requests for renewed financing. I remember various times when, for lack of a precise definition of what constitutes a prolonged user of IMF resources, the Board may not have been consistent, or even fair, in its decision making. This situation reminds me of a comment by Leon Blum, the great French socialist politician, who once said "clarifier c'est moraliser" [to clarify is to moralize].

The IEO's review shows how important a common analytical framework is for the IMF's work. It is correct to say that IMF management and staff were fully aware of the fragility of the assets in many countries' financial institutions, but it is also true that we in the IMF did not fully understand the possible consequences of such fragility. Ultimately, for people of my generation, there is, in the work of the IEO, an invitation to reread Don Patinkin's well-known work, Money, Interest and Prices, which...