The Imf And The World Bank Essay

In the documentary, Christopher Guldbrandsen reveals how Glencore, which is a Swiss company, is making billions of money from copper mining in Zambia. As they do this, the country remains among the poorest in the world. Nobody will be surprised to learn that World Bank and IMF were involved in the business of the mines that later led to the current situation. Many people ask themselves as to when the African countries will stop taking pieces of advice from such institutions. The policies recommended by such institutions have been disastrous for Africa and all other developing nations in other continents. The practice results in a continuous transfer of wealth to the north from the south. Why is the IMF controversial? It is such a pity that the IMF has even tried pushing its policies on China.

The International Monetary Fund is an organization created in 1945 consisting of 187 member-countries with goals to foster a global cooperative monetary system, promote international trade growth and exchange rate stability, and maintain a multilateral system of payments. The IMF attempts to achieve these goals by surveilling the global economy, providing financial assistance through credits and loans, and by providing technical assistance. The organization has been surrounded in controversies due to their severe policies that nations are required to follow in order to receive loans, assistance, and debt relief. With this influence on debtor nation’s economies, the IMF controls how much is spent on environmental protection, healthcare, and education. These strict policies undermine political institutions and have had a negative impact on many nations, including Argentina.

This can be shown by the US having 17% control of the executive board meaning they have the right to veto as board approval requires 85%. Whereas India has only 2.44% of voting rights compared to the Netherlands who are significantly weaker in terms of economic power who have 2.17% . It can be argued that the way the voting structure works iensures that the IMF would prioritise its creditors and voters, so the EU and USA have a combined total of 49% thus they hold great sway over the institution. This can explain how in terms of loans 79.5% have gone to European countries, with the largest loans going to Greece, Portugal and Ireland to bail out their banks. Another accusation is that the IMF in general tends to create more harm than good when attempting to help countries as shown in the fast track scheme. Where they gave far too much loans to Argentina and they were forced to default . A similar event occurred to create the 1997 East Asia crisis where the IMF encouraged countries affected to borrow their way out of trouble thus making the crisis worse. These events were not prioritised by western country whereas when the Euro crisis hit the west only then did the IMF pour in billions to save essential countries in Europe. The IMF can be considered strongly European for all 11 directors in the IMF’s history have been European. So the IMF can be considered to be working in favour of western interests as

In an effort to bring an end to world poverty the World Bank and IMF (International Monetary Fund) were established in 1944. Consisting of members from 44 nations “The Bank and the IMF are twin intergovernmental pillars supporting the structure of the world's economic and financial order”(Driscoll, 1996). In other words they are international economic organizations that grant loans to third world countries for development programs.

Based on what I read, the IMF and the World Bank are good organizations. The purpose of them it's to prevent economies crises and when they were founded, help to rebuild economies affected because of war. However, I found one project on the internet shows the opposite. The support for this project from World Bank gave was indirect because one of its own organizations, the International Finance Corp provided loans to an American company

The World Bank or the IMF is managed by big economically powerful nations, even though they were created to protect and help countries that are in need . They first look for the benefit of these big countries and try to make other countries dependent on loans.

In june of 2012, the world bank committed about $52.6 billion in loans, grants, equity investments, and helps in promoting economic growth, poverty and economic enterprise. The IMF promotes international monetary cooperation and also provides policy advice and technical assistance which helps countries maintain strong economies. The world bank promotes long term economic development and poverty reduction by providing technical/financial support to help countries reform.

Throughout, there is a keen sense that the IMF is completely guided by ideology which is focused on the free market and the markets’ ability to guide the economy properly at all times. It would seem that all those who work at the IMF are misguided and/or towing the party line in the form of the Washington Consensus. Moreover, of greater concern is perhaps that throughout this piece, it would seem that the World Bank could do no wrong. Stiglitz portrays himself and the World Bank as the white knight(s) who were championing the rights of those who could not fight for themselves against the US government, the US Treasury and even the Federal Reserve. He does so with little regard to any policies or actions that these organizations have done for positive reasons or with positive results. He displays unwavering support for governments to stimulate aggregate demand via social spending, so it is surprising that he is so punitive towards Western governments.

The World Bank is known to fund many infrastructure projects in developing countries, presumably as a means to achieve their goals of increasing development in those countries. Hydroelectric dams are some of the much-maligned infrastructure projects funded by the World Bank. In a report authored by employees of the World Bank itself, the authors themselves highlight the “adverse environmental and related social impacts” of large dams, while attempting to draw a distinction between “relatively good dams and bad dams”. (Ledec & Quintero, 2003)

The International Monetary Fund (IMF or The Fund) began its conception in July 1944. "The IMF's primary purpose is to ensure the stability of the international monetary system—the system of exchange rates and international payments that enables countries (and their citizens) to transact with each other" ("About the IMF"). Given that the nature of the IMF is to ensure the stability of the international monetary system one would assume that given the level of public exposure and level of participating countries that it would be immune to adversity. The purpose of this paper is to present one instance where the IMF failed in its initial and ongoing responsibilities causing greater financial duress for the recipient of assistance.

The three major international economic institutions are the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization; this book mainly focuses on the IMF and the World Bank, due to the author’s first-hand experience with both institutions. The IMF, a public institution built as a guiding hand for economic stability around the world, has brought false

However, although globalization has helped several countries, "in some developing countries, foreign aid and investments are not relieving widespread poverty, and policies forced by global institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank have created more harm than good, because the policies are based on models constructed by the developed countries and are not customized for each developing country 's situation" (2003).

“If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem; but if you owe it a million, it has.(1)”

For decades the institutions of the Washington Consensus (WC); International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB), have dominated the international political economy. Under the leadership of the United States, the Eagle, those

This failure was harshly criticized by some economists as a failure of the "one size fits all" Washington Consensus approach (Stiglitz, 2008). Also, IMF itself admitted some responsibility and mistakes in worsening Argentina crisis (Conway, 2004). Anyway, while IMF never considered the Washington Consensus approach as the root of the problems in Argentina, and explained its faults as being a matter of growth forecast errors (Blanchard & Leigh, 2013), most of the widely agreed criticisms to IMF targeted exactly the Washington Consensus approach and the mindset behind it: "Government as the problem, and markets as the solution" (Stiglitz, 2008, n.d.). In practice, IMF is sometimes perceived as an institution much more involved in liberalization and privatization than in solving economic crisis, and this perception fuels hostile feelings among the population of assisted countries suffering for structural reforms. So, though it is still not proven that the Washington Consensus policies are definitely wrong, it is clear enough that IMF should revise its approach and mindset and should take more care of the social outcome of the economic policies it requests, if it wants to stop being blamed for social riots. A simple way to achieve this goal could be the sharing of risks and responsibilities for erroneous policies that IMF dictates. The righteousness of policies could be judged in respect to the spread between real growth