Surveillance, IMF Quota, and Debt Issues To Be Featured at Spring Meetings

• Author: David M. Cheney
• Position: Editor, IMF Survey
• Pages: 127-128

Page 127

Finance ministers and central bank governors will gather on April 28 in Washington for the forty-eighth meeting of the IMF's principal advisory body, the Interim Committee of the IMF's Board of Governors on the International Monetary System (the Interim Committee)-under the Chairmanship of Belgian Finance Minister Philippe Maystadt. The Interim Committee will consider global economic prospects and recent adaptations of IMF surveillance over the policies of its member countries, given efforts to reinforce surveillance in response to the challenges of globalized financial markets. It will also discuss the status of the eleventh general review of IMF quotas, a special "equity"allocation of SDRs, and financing to continue the IMF's enhanced structural adjustment facility (ESAF)-the IMF's concessional financing facility for poor countries engaged in growth-oriented macroeconomic and structural adjustment-and the associated IMF-World Bank debt initiative to reduce the external debt burden of heavily indebted poor countries (HIPCs).

The Interim Committee session will be followed by the fifty-fifth meeting of the Joint Bank and Fund Committee on the Transfer of Real Resources to Developing Countries (the Development Committee), on April 29. The Development Committee will be chaired by Moroccan Finance Minister Mohamed Kabbaj. The first item on the agenda is a discussion of proposals to strengthen support for development cooperation- including ways to enhance the effective use of declining flows of official development assistance. The Development Committee will also consider progress in implementing the HIPC initiative, resources for the Bank's Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), and ways to facilitate private involvement in infrastructure.

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The spring meetings of the Interim and Development Committees will be preceded by meetings of the Group of Ten industrial countries, Ministers of the Group of 24 developing countries, and Deputies of the Group of 24. Also, on April 23, Michael Mussa, Economic Counsellor and Director of the IMF's Research Department, will brief the press on the spring 1997 edition of the IMF's World Economic Outlook.

IMF Surveillance

The Interim Committee will discuss IMF surveillance of member country policies with the benefit of a report on the Executive Board's recent...