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IMF-World Bank group meetings -- Taking over others' turfs

B.S.Raghavan

I AM reporting from virtual Washington where the meetings of the Development Committee and the International Monetary and Finance Committee, interspersed with media conferences, were held from April 25 under the aegis of the International Monetary Fund ( IMF) and the World Bank Group (WBG). Comfortably ensconced in my soho (small office home office), on streaming video I watched the whole proceedings and heard the statements of the leading players on the world's financial stage. All the documents, includ ing the World Economic Outlook, and media transcripts, besides the innumerable handouts of non-governmental organisations, were in my hands via my PC within moments of being released. In addition, I had something which I would not have had from hour to h our had I been physically at the venue of the meetings: Commentaries over the print and electronic media as they appeared round the world. What a delight to be a denizen of the digital age!

The meetings concluded on April 30. They are not full-fledged plenaries of all 183 member-nations of both the organisations, which take place in Autumn (September-October). The Spring meetings are confined to 24 members, and in parallel with them the loo se Group 7, Group 10 and Group 24 ministers carry on their confabulations on problems of developed and developing countries and issue their own statements. Other than brief references to the World Economic Outlook, the media in the US took little notice of the meetings.

The meetings are of interest to India if for no other reason than that the Finance Minister, Mr Yashwant Sinha, elected as the chairman last year for a two-year term, presided over them. They, no doubt, gave him the opportunity to share India's experienc es in economic reforms and enabled him to issue a statement on India's stand on the agenda of no earth-shaking consequence. In any case, the thrust of the discussions was directed at Africa, Argentina and Turkey and similar issues peripheral to India's r ole (such as the ravages of HIV/AIDS), and Mr Sinha might as well have saved his time and energy by leaving the meetings to a proxy but for compulsions of protocol.

Jolt to conventional wisdom

Only a handful (200 or so) compared to the 30,000 and odd protesters who had flexed their muscle in Quebec City on the occasion of the Summit of the Americas (April 20-22), demonstrated at the Washington meetings. But by their tumultuous shows of strengt h from the Seattle WTO ministerial session onwards, the crusaders for the world's poor have succeeded in giving a jolt to the conventional wisdom on globalisation and free trade. This is patent from both the IMF and the WBG emphasising in paper after pap er churned out by them that the benefits of development must be accessible to all, and not just a few.

They also point to the imperative need for orienting their activities towards ameliorating the condition of the poor and ensuring unhindered access for developing countries to developed country markets. (As per the estimate of the IMF-WBG, if the US, the European Union, Canada and Japan were to give free access to the least developed countries, net exports of LDCs would increase by about 11 per cent and non-oil exports from Africa would expand by 14 per cent.)

The document on the WBG's role in leveraging trade for development circulated to the Spring meetings, after noting that the share of the developing countries in global capital flows has fallen `steeply' from 14 per cent in 1997 to less than 8 per cent in 2000, goes on: ``At the global level, developing countries, more important in size and sophistication than ever before, are now pivotal to the success of the world trading system. Their interests have to be taken into account if any new multilateral tra de negotiations are to be successful and if the multilateral system is to be strengthened.''

Sentences such as the above would have been unthinkable in the IMF-WBG documents some years ago.

Hardly momentous

Before moving on to a review of substantive issues, a word about the documentation. The sweep of the subjects covered is enormous, and replete with tables and boxes, but the narration is so verbose and viscous as to make it difficult for an ordinary read er to grasp what is meant at the first reading. It is time the staff of these organisations and the consultants working for them are put through a rigorous course of training on writing simple English.

Also, the wordsmiths in IMF-WBG, in common with other international bodies, feel insecure unless they bandy about all manner of esoteric architectures, frameworks, initiatives, strategies, toolkits and the like under fancy names obfuscating the purpose. Savour a sample: Heavily Indebted Poor Country Initiative (for debt relief); Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper Process (for poverty reduction); Sector Strategy Papers (for sectoral schemes); Comprehensive Development Framework (for integrated development programmes); Country Assistance Strategies (for country-specific projects); knowledge bank (for sharing and disseminating the latest developments in various fields, including information technology); matrix management (meaning unclear); strategic staffin g (unclear). Simple and self-evident titles would have been of great help to the busy dignitaries in gaining a better understanding of the proposals and ensuring implementation of the recommendations.

The bewildering variety of topics to be addressed by the participants extend from poverty reduction and debt relief efforts, leveraging trade for development and public debt management at one end to action against AIDS, bailing out countries embroiled in conflicts, guidelines for operating an effective insolvency mechanism, and operational policies and procedures conducive to a sound and stable international financial system. Somewhere in between the IMF-WBG duo branch off with a full discourse on the l inks between poverty reduction and global public goods (defined by the WBG as knowledge creation, health, education, environmental commons, safeguarding peace and security).

Candy floss-like, they sound and seem substantive, but when compressed, they turn out to be nothing more than little pellets of the same old stale platitudes peddled in the jargon of callow consultants who, obviously, lack any mentionable experience of g round realities in various countries. Also, they are mostly a hark-back to the themes of many such meetings that had gone before, and essentially update the committees and groups on the current status. As such, they are hardly momentous enough to justify either the long duration of the meetings or the expense and effort undertaken by dignitaries in attending them.

Trespassing into others' turfs

The chief objection to the agenda is not just on the ground of being repetitive, but of being presumptuous. Over a period, the IMF and the WBG have become past masters in pirouetting their way into the turfs of other international bodies. Whether it is b ecause they are under-worked or because the members of their Governing Boards, insulated from any informed scrutiny of their actions back in their home countries, are only too willing to rubberstamp whatever proposals come to them, they have managed to t respass into territories which are not their legitimate concern.

This they do by exploiting the catchall nature of goals such as poverty reduction and development. These two concepts are so general in connotation that they lend themselves to being addressed on as many fronts, planes and directions as can be imagined - - all the way, as the IMF-WBG have shown, from agriculture to rural development to mining to AIDS to education to health, nutrition and population to trade, to insolvency to environment, to global public goods to technology dissemination. It is one thing to be conscious of the interconnectivities among them calling for a holistic view but another to take them over as integral parts of organisational charters.

Doing so poses the danger of duplication of expenditure and energy on similar schemes and all the associated paraphernalia within the jurisdiction of other agencies on the one hand and on the other, contradictory, and hence confusing and counter-producti ve, approaches to the same problems within the same countries.

It makes no sense for the World Bank on its own or in tandem with the IMF to take the time of member-governments on stand-alone strategies for agriculture, AIDS, malaria, TB and other communicable diseases, population, health, nutrition, education, trade and environment, when there are organisations, such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the World Trade Organisation (WTO), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) with exclusive mandates and laudable track record in respect of each of them.

(To be continued)