Participants review measures taken to refocus IMF and promote transparency
| Author | John Starrels |
| Position | IMF External Relations Department |
| Pages | 176 |
Page 176
On April 27, senior officials from the IMF, the World Bank, and the U.S. government, and others briefed the Bretton Woods Committee on key developments at the IMF and the World Bank, and called for increased public understanding of their contributions. Speaking at the annual meeting of the nonprofit committee-which is based in the United States and was organized to advance public awareness of international financial and development issues-were IMF First Deputy Managing Director Stanley Fischer; U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell; U.S. Representative James Kolbe, who heads the Foreign Operations Subcommittee; Angel Gurría, Mexico's former Minister for Finance and Public Credit, who cochaired a recent commission on the role of multilateral development banks;World Bank President James Wolfensohn; and Inter-American Development Bank President Enrique Iglesias.
Fischer reviewed the changes under way to refocus the IMF, emphasizing that promoting transparency and adherence to international codes of good practices is central to the new agenda.He also highlighted the importance the IMF attaches to updating its armory of lending facilities and its new, broad-based initiative to engage the private sector in crisis prevention. "In recent months, the IMF has deepened its analysis of capital markets as an integral part of the IMF's surveillance activities, with the objective of contributing to crisis prevention," he noted. The organization also has given priority to changing how the IMF applies conditionality.
"Notwithstanding the importance of structural policies in the countries to which we lend, there is general agreement," explained Fischer, "that our conditionality in this area has sometimes become unduly detailed and restrictive."
The new objective is to "confine conditionality to areas that are critical to a program's success," he said, "but drawing the lines between critical and merely useful is not easy."The challenge, he added, is to help countries reach a point at which their programs are both locally owned and of high quality.
The broad tone of the meeting was set by Powell, who indicated that "the United States's prosperity and wellbeing are linked ever more closely to expanding growth and stability worldwide. That is why strong U.S. leadership in the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO...
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