A new orientation for the IMF

The annual meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will take place this year in Prague from 25 to 28 September. On the agenda will probably be a discussion of a new orientation for the IMF. Hardly any international organisation has received as much criticism as the IMF. As a result of monetary crises that the IMF could not prevent - Mexico 1994, South East Asia 1997, Russia 1998, Brazil 1999 - a number of reform proposals have been voiced that include demands for a radical rejection of the previous policies of crisis management, for a stronger orientation on market forces, and for a drastic reduction of loans; the most widely publicised were the proposals in the Meltzer Report commissioned by the U.S. Congress. In his comments, Professor Karlhans Sauernheimer of the University of Mainz provides a critical examination of the various new concepts for the IMF especially in light of the changed international conditions since the founding of the IMF in 1945. Caio K. Koch-Wesser, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Finance, and Professor Gerhard Illing, University of Frankfurt a.M., emphasize the importance of the IMF as crisis manager for countries encountering shortages of liquid funds. Private lenders, however, should be included in the restructuring.