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Reforming the Governance of the IMF and the World Bank

By Ariel Buira

Intergovernmental Group of Twenty-Four, September 1, 2005

Anthem Press
ISBN: 1843312115; £16.99 (Paperback); 328 pages

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BOOK DESCRIPTION

Sixty years after their creation, the Bretton Woods institutions face a crisis of legitimacy that impairs their credibility and effectiveness. At the roots of this crisis lies the unrepresentative nature of their structure of governance, which places control of the institutions in the hands of a small group of industrial countries that do not use its resources. These countries consider the developing countries and economies in transition, as minor partners, despite accounting for half of the world’s output in real terms, most of the world’s population and encompassing the most dynamic economies and the largest holders of international reserves.

The quota formulas should reflect the size of the economies of members, i.e. their GDP, their exposure to trade and capital movements as well as their ability to contribute to the Fund. If IMF quotas were based on objective measures, i.e. size of GDP, the volatility of receipts, the adjustment of European quotas for intra-trade and trade in a single currency in the euro area, the quota share of developing countries and economies in transition as a group should be no less than that of industrial countries.

Reality has outpaced the evolution of thinking on the subject of governance. The growing breach between world economic and financial realities and the governance structure of the Bretton Woods institutions argues for reforms to increase the effectiveness and restore the legitimacy of these institutions. As debtors, the European countries had resisted conditionality during the first decades of the IMF and favoured increasing Fund resources, but as their situation changed, they no longer resorted to IMF support and they changed their position. Similar problems appear in the World Bank, giving rise to large negative flows of resources from the developing countries.

The papers included in this book cover different aspects of the governance of the Bretton Woods institutions. They explore different options for reform and show that enhancing the participation of developing and emerging market countries in resolving the major monetary and financial problems confronting the world economy, would improve global economic performance and contribute to the elimination of world poverty.

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ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS

Editor:
Ariel Buira is Director of the G24 Secretariat. He has been Special Envoy of the President of Mexico for the UN Conference on Financing for Development, Ambassador of Mexico, Member of the Board of Governors of the Bank of Mexico and Executive Director of the IMF. His publications include The IMF and the World Bank at Sixty (Anthem Press, 2005) and Challenges to the World Bank and IMF: Developing Country Perspectives (Anthem Press, 2003).

Contributors:
Jomo Kwame Sundaram is Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development in the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations

V. Bhaskar is a member of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS). He currently serves as a Commissioner to the Andhra Pradesh Government, India

J. Lawrence Broz is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego

Cord Jakobeit is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Hamburg University, Germany

Vijay Kelkar has more than 30 years of experience with economic policy making related to both national and international economic policy issues

Guillermo Le Fort V holds a Ph.D. in Economics from UCLA, Magister and Licenciado degrees from Universidad de Chile and works as a consultant in Economic and Financial Matters

Dennis Leech is Reader in Economics at the University of Warwick, and a Research Associate of the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences at the LSE

Robert Leech is currently a Post-doctoral Researcher in Cognitive Science at Birkbeck, University of London

John McLenaghan has held a number of senior positions on the staff of the IMF, where he was Division Chief in the Exchange and Trade Relations Department and Deputy Director of the Statistics Department

Murilo Portugal is Deputy Finance Minister of Brazil

David Rapkin is Associate Professor at the University of Nebraska, where he has served as Graduate Chair and Department Chair

Jonathan Strand is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Marta Vanduzer-Snow is a Research Scholar in the Department of Politics, New York University and is also an Associate Scholar at the India Development Foundation, New Delhi

Ngaire Woods is Director of the Global Economic Governance Programme at University College, Oxford

Praveen Chaudhry teaches in the Political Science department at Ohio University, USA and is also an Associate Scholar at the India Development foundation, New Dehli.

External Link: http://www.anthempress.com/product_info.php?cPath=1...

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