International Financial Institution Reform
The SJC's educational programs on World Bank and IMF reform focus on the decision making processes that have been widely recognized as undemocratic and lacking important messures to ensure accountability. The SJC has provided analysis and educational material on aspects of monitoring and evaluation, identifying and eliminating unproductive conditionalities, and strengthening the "voice" of small countries and affected communities.
- Issues of concern as the World Bank and IMF prepare for their Annual Meetings in Washington October 20-22 2007, and recommendations provided to the Government of Canada:
- IMF and World Bank Reform – lack of movement on voice and representation, and on the selection process for leadership at the World Bank and IMF
- The Independent Evaluation Office report on the IMF in Africa - “business as usual”
- Liberia debt to the World Bank and IMF - the need for cancellation
- Declining and less-than-effective MDB spending on HIV/AIDS
- World Bank weak on labour standards and worker protection
- Concern that policy choices on women’s health and climate change are guided by US government ideology
- Quiz on the International Monetary Fund and World Bank [June 7 2007]
- Vote for the new World Bank President! [May 31 2007]
- Quiz on SAPs. [April 17 2007]
- Guyana: Experience of Economic Reform under World Bank and IMF Direction [Acrobat Reader format, Nov 9 2005]
- Driving Under the Influence: Senegal's PRSP Process [Acrobat Reader format, Nov 9 2005]
- Canada failing as Guyana's Advocate at the World Bank [Nov 24 2005]
- Empowerment and the World Bank
- Dialogue with the IMF
- Enhancing
Voice at IFIs [Sept 2004]
Voice at the Bretton Woods Institutions that is of most concern to the Social Justice Committee is that of citizens, especially in countries where the World Bank and IMF are most active and influential. We make various recommendations to address voice deficits, focusing on the need for enhanced transparency and inclusion. Transparency at the Boards could be improved in a number of ways, including the provision of more detailed agendas, earlier disclosure of papers presented to the Boards, and more information regarding of discussion at the Boards.
We also explore ways in which the voice of citizens and their governments could be enhanced before decisions reach the Board level. World Bank and IMF missions conducting their business in-country should be more transparent and inclusive, with civil society involvement in determining the need for and implementation of impact assessments. Poor country voice at the Boards would be benefited immensely by improved voice in program design. The paper then focuses on the Executive Directors' offices, and makes recommendations based on some fifty interviews with staffs of six Executive Directors' offices at both the IMF and World Bank, as well as central staff. Common themes concerning voice emerged from these meetings, such as the need for more capacity for the sub-Saharan African Executive Directors' offices, more open and productive communication between Executive Directors' offices generally, better recruitment and induction, and language training. The result is a number of practical recommendations to address these concerns, such as Executive Directors' offices sharing weekly agendas to improve communication, and for the institutions to provide improved central personnel, training and language support. - Discussion of Poverty and Social Impact Analysis
- Water, Land
and Labour: The Impacts of Forced Privatization in Vulnerable Communities
[Acrobat Reader Format, July 2003]
Paper from the Social Justice Committee and Halifax Initiative Coalition provides an extensive survey of experience with privatization of public services and natural resource extraction, and examines the roles and motives of the IMF and World Bank in requiring privatization as a condition for financial support, development assistance and debt relief.
This review "reveals a trend of exclusion... Privatization often leads to the loss of jobs. It often results in lower quality service to the poor and in higher costs for communities at large in impoverished countries. There is little or no evidence to show that large-scale privatization, as directed by the IMF and World Bank, results in improvement in services and an increase in quality of life for people."
While accepting that privatization can be appropriate in some situations, the paper challenges the assertion that privatization brings economic efficiency and thus social benefit, and concludes that the international financial institutions should cease incorporating privatization requirements into their programs. - Participatory
processes in international financial policy: Engaging civil society in the
policy process
Discussion paper on how to make engagement between civil society and policy makers honest and effective. [Acrobat format] - Extractive
Industries and the Role of the World Bank.
This brief describes World Bank involvement in these extractive industries, specifically the devastating effects of these projects on local people and the environment and the solutions put forward by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to correct these problems. - A letter sent to G7 finance ministers prior to a meeting in 2002
- A submission brief to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Tradesent prior to a G8 meeting in 2002
- Calls for debt relief are loudThe SJC responds to the IMF letter to the editor with a letter of its own, arguing that African people and their leaders have been calling for complete debt cancellation loudly and clearly for years. [Word format]
- IMF responds to SJC op-ed, calls debt relief a "free ride". A letter to the editor in the Montreal Gazette argues that impoverished countries don't want debt relief, but prefer IMF programs that will lead to a "brighter future". ("The consensus is that available aid money should be put to the best possible use in new poverty-reducing programs – including in those poor countries that never got into trouble with debt – rather than giving a free ride to those who borrowed too much in the past.") 28 July 2001
-
World
Bank should stop acting like a loan shark"Op-ed by Derek MacCuish,
Montreal Gazette 15 July 2001
"In January, Canada got out of the loan shark business and stopped collecting debt from the poorest countries. In fact, all rich countries are committing to debt cancellation one way or another. Italy, as the host country for the G7 gathering next week, has put together a proposal to take debt relief even further.
All this commitment to debt cancellation seems to terrify the World Bank and IMF. They're worried that they'll be told to do the same..." - Ernie Schibli on the FTAA
- Criticism of the FTAA (April 2001)
- Why oppose the FTAA? Some reasons
- SJC's statement on the FTAA
- SJC condemns World Bank Support of Shell Oil in Nigeria
-
"Get your hand
out of my pocket!" a paper on economic justice from the SJC. How
a privileged minority take the wealth of the world. Despite years of energetic
global economic growth, most of the world lives in poverty. The money is out
there, but most people will never see more than a fraction of it, because of
systemic methods of siphoning money up through the classes into the hands of
the wealthy few.
These methods include corporate tax evasion (developing countries can't collect about US$90 billion per year that corporations owe them) currency speculation (over a trillion dollars a day moves around the world, from currency to currency, feeding off the falling values of the weaker players) unregulated capital movement (short term investments aiming for a quick profit when the time is right) military spending (the money spent on weapons and soldiers would more than cover the costs of providing clean water and proper nutrition for the world, stop deforestation, global warming and ozone depletion, provide shelter and renewable and/or efficient energy, and retire Third World debt). [Word format] - World Bank funds oil project in Chad & Cameroon, despite human rights and environment problems (June 2000)
- Conditions for debt relief What the World Bank and IMF require, and how it hurts the poor (April 2000)
- Structural adjustment programmes and debt, as items of consideration under economic, social and cultural rights (Item 10) of the provisional agenda of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, fifty-sixth session (March - April 2000). Statement prepared for the human rights consultations between the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Canadian non-governmental community. 6 March 2000.
- Aspects of Evaluation Relevant to the Establishment of an Independent Evaluation Unit at the IMF [Acrobat Reader format]
-
Debt-creating aspects of export
credit as a particular concern in developing economies.
Prepared by the Social Justice Committee as part of the policy paper "Race to the top - how to make the Export Development Corporation responsible to people and the environment", by the EDC Working Group of the Halifax Initiative Coalition. (Nov. 1999) [Word format] -
A
New financial architecture at the expense of the poor.
The IMF refuses to undertake needed reform of its programs to ensure that, at the least, they do not add to human suffering. (Spring 1999) - Interview with Aly Ercelawn: Fighting water privatization in Pakistan
- Harry Boesak of the Workers Support Committee, Namibia, on "the everyday issues of the working class in Southern Africa, such as the trade union movement, and privatization of public utilities."
- Yosh Tandon A political economist from Zimbabwe, on "conserving basic morality and decency. It is important for our people to prevent these values from being dictated by governments, large trans-national corporations, or international organizations such the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO."
- Rosemary Nyerere Mwamakula Member of parliament, Tanzania, on "the immediate needs of our people as well as our goals on the international scale"
- Structural Adjustment in Canada.The text of IMF reports on the Canadian economy, calling for cuts to old age pensions, unemployment insurance and health care. Other cuts recommended: human resources and small business loans, and grants to aboriginal peoples, science and technology, and public broadcasting. (1994-1995) [Acrobat Reader format]