International Financial Institutions : Dealing with New Global Challenges

International Monetary Fund

• Publisher: INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781451950199

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International Financial Institutions: Dealing with New Global Challenges

MICHEL CAMDESSUS

It is a great honor to have been invited by the Per Jacobsson Foundation to deliver this address, and so to be given another opportunity to walk, albeit briefly, in the footsteps of the great third Managing Director of the IMF, Per Jacobsson. Not only that, but looking at the list of my predecessors at this podium, you seem to have given me a quasi guarantee of immortality.

On 13 occasions, I had the privilege to address the world financial community at the Annual Meetings on emerging global challenges and the best ways for our institutions to address them. Let me say, by the way, that Rodrigo de Rato and Paul Wolfowitz did this yesterday in outstanding ways.

So, when I was invited by Andrew Crockett and Leo Van Houtven to dwell once again on these issues, I thought that I would try to do something that might have been seen as presumptuous of me 10 or 15 years ago—namely, take a long-term view, and put current problems in a long-term perspective. This is what I would like to do today for a very pressing personal reason, namely, that I have become a grandfather of eight children and, as all of you who share the blessing of grandchildren will understand, I am concerned about the kind of world we are preparing for them. Of course, the prospects for further rapid progress of globalization, and with it rapid growth in living standards and further steps toward world unity, could justify optimism, but reasons for concern are no less obvious. Trying to imagine the international climate in which they will live—will it be one of cooperative partnership, or of harsh resentment and conflict?—I see particular importance in the roles of the World Bank and IMF and the other international financial institutions (IFIs). They can make a major difference, and this matters to me.

Our institutions have vital roles, in particular, in helping to provide a global environment of stable and sustainable growth, and in helping the world address two key challenges: helping emerging countries become more advanced and helping the poorest to reduce poverty—at least to reach the Millennium Development Goals: a welcome, unprecedented initiative by the international community—and thus to reduce exclusion and associated threats to security, including terrorism. These challenges invite us to evaluate our present efforts by looking ahead 10-15 years, to 2015-20. Of course, looking this far ahead is less a matter of baseline scenarios than one of minimizing risks and maximizing opportunities in an uncertain future. But I will suggest that one of the surest ways of achieving it is to continue to support the IFIs in a spirit of multilateralism—the approach of the founding fathers when they created these institutions to help the world face a future full of uncertainties in 1944.

So let me try to identify what will likely be the key global challenges of the next 15 years, and a few elements of a strategy to face them. I will naturally focus particularly on the IMF, and I emphasize that any views I express are strictly personal.

* * *

FACING THE FUTURE

I have just referred to the need for global stability, and the challenges of helping emerging market economies make rapid progress toward the most advanced status, and fighting poverty.

Just by mentioning these issues, we already see how central the roles of our institutions should be in the decades to come. But looking ahead more broadly, we see a longer list of challenges that are global in nature, which can be dealt with effectively only by institutions with global competence, acting in close coordination with national authorities. Consider, for instance,

—the many potential sources of instability in emerging markets;

—the magnitude of global current account imbalances;

—the ongoing worldwide demographic transitions;

—the global energy crisis;

—the HIV/AIDS crisis and other pandemics;

—the present challenges to global public goods such as prevention of conflicts, health, and environmental preservation;

—the threat of global warming; and

—terrorism and other global threats.

We are very familiar with this list of challenges—too familiar, perhaps, as we tend to lose sight of the magnitude of these threats.¹ We must face them, and in a way that takes on boar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Opening Remarks Andrew D. Crockett
• International Financial Institutions: Dealing with New Global Challenges Michel Camdessus
• Biography
• The Per Jacobsson Lectures
• The Per Jacobsson Foundation
• Footnotes