What’s Really Happening at the IMF/World Bank Spring Meetings? More Than You Think (Washington Post)
Visiting Fellow Scott Morris is quoted in a Washington Post article on how decisions are really made at the spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF, beyond the lofty goals and publicized events
With the world’s finance ministers, central bankers and development experts gathered in Washington for the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the mood is certainly aspirational.
Thursday afternoon the World Bank alone held major events on the importance of protecting women’s economic rights, meeting universal education goals, and incorporating the value of ecosystems into economic analysis. The IMF had its own agenda underway as well.
It’s a huge week also for the think tanks – with the Brookings Institution, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Bertelsmann Foundation and others battling for attention, and so many central bank governors and finance ministers lined up to speak they all sort of cancel each other out.
Why give Mark Carney, of Britain by way of Canada, any more credence than Lorenzo Bini-Smaghi, late of the European Central Bank but now a free agent? Is that Stan Fischer at the coffee stand? Which of a half dozen possible governments is he working for now?
Work does get done. Communiques will be issued by the World Bank and the IMF, and other organizations like the Group of 20 major economic powers and the G24 committee of developing nations. They may even be of substance. Kim, for example, is expecting an endorsement of his broad strategic goals for the bank; the G24 endorsed a plan by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – the so-called BRICS nations – to set up their own development bank as a complement/competitor to the World Bank.
But the real value may be at a quieter level beyond all the panel discussions and photo ops.
Outside the public eye, people like Kim, Lagarde and Lew are holding dozens of one-on-one meetings – “speed dating” is how former Treasury official Scott Morris, now an analyst at the Center for Global Development, refers to it. It’s in those sessions that Egypt tries to make progress on a hoped-for IMF loan, or Indonesian minister Mari Pangestu lobbies to become director general of the World Trade Organization, or U.S. officials get private estimates of China’s shale gas reserves.
That is the grunt work of economic diplomacy that won’t be broadcast on the jumbotron that the World Bank has erected outside its headquarters.
That’s reserved for advice on global warming.
