Ngaire Woods addresses the urgent but difficult task of reforming the world’s international financial institutions in a report for the Progressive Governance Conference hosted by Gordon Brown in April 2008.
In the report, she writes that global cooperation among governments is urgently needed to manage the current financial crisis. In principle, the IMF and World Bank are ideally placed to play a key role. They sit at the heart of intergovernmental cooperation: conducting consultations on exchange rate policy; lending to countries in financial crisis; providing assistance after conflict and natural disasters; and setting standards, offering advice and providing development assistance.
But in practice, neither institution is adequately equipped to ensure cooperation to deal with the current crisis. Put simply, neither institution has a governance structure which today commands the confidence of emerging economic powers whose cooperation is vital if global collective action is to resolve the financial crisis.
