Restructuring Multi-Lateral Agencies: Need of the Hour

Abstract

Fund and the Bank exist because their neutral and apparently technical advice may be less offensive to national sentiments than direct intervention by the United States. The very statement reflects on the fact about the activities of the Bank and the Fund being circumscribed by their most powerful members. Analyses of their activities and appropriate role have intensified in the wake of the Mexican peso crisis at the end of 1994 and the Asian crisis in the summer of 1997. The very creation of multilateral organizations reflects the fact that, in order to propound a vision of the global economy, the participation of a large number of states in the world is required. Such participation in turn requires that a wide range of countries believe in the institutions' legitimacy: that they perceive the institutions to proffer a particular technical expertise as well as a certain degree of independence, a genuinely international character, and actions which are rule-based rather than reflecting US discretionary judgments. It is the purpose of this paper to provide a selective review of the Bank and Fund's current roles and the choices that confront them for the future.