FINANCE: IMF, Critics Differ on ‘Revolution’ in Openness

By Emad Mekay Reprint | | Print |

Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Dec 15 2001 (IPS) - The International Monetary Fund (IMF), long criticised for secrecy, says it is well on its way to transparency but critics counter the global institution remains largely mysterious and shadowy.

“There has been an understated revolution in the last several years,” says Ydahlia Metzgen, who heads the coordination and standards division in the IMF’s policy development and review department. “There have been key changes in the Fund in terms of transparency, of the organisation and the openness with respect to how we do business and also our accountability aspect.”

As recently as 1997, Metzgen recalls, few of the 183-nation agency’s internal documents were ever published and access to information was almost non-existent. Now, summaries of the results of its country consultations are published when shareholder governments volunteer to share this information – resulting in a publication rate for such documents of around 86 percent.

Nearly 96 percent of country-level policy documents such as the letters of intent co-signed by the IMF and borrower governments are published or posted on the IMF web site, www.imf.org, she adds.

The Fund recently created its Independent Evaluation Office, an internal monitoring mechanism, and has begun informal consultations with activists, civil society groups, and other “stakeholders”.

“The info available on our web site is truly phenomenal,” adds Thomas Dawson, director of the IMF’s external relations department. “The Fund web page contains enough information to allow serious students of the Fund to understand what the institution is up to. The reporting of the Fund accounting practices and financial position has improved to a point that even I can understand it.”

“Information once closely guarded as state secrets is now routinely published,” Dawson asserts.

Veteran analyst Angela Wood, of the London-based non-governmental Bretton Woods Project, cautiously agrees.

“In terms of the wider world I would not call recent transparency moves ‘revolutionary’ but in the IMF context, it’s certainly a big change,” Wood says. “They’ve taken steps that they should have been taken years ago. Having said that, they have gone further than the (World) Bank.”

Nevertheless, she adds, civil society groups demand faster and better access to information, including draft internal evaluations and staff reports. Campaigners argue that access to such information can nurture public debate and democratise countries’ economic planning, and in the process help pre-empt some of the harm often done to vulnerable groups.

At present, Wood says, most Fund documents are released only after heavy redacting and only after the fact – draft documents and information about pending decisions seldom are available to parliaments, let alone the public.

“Releasing draft documents would be much more revolutionary,” she says.

“Transparency is not only about disclosure of information,” adds Daniel Bradlow, a law professor at American University. “It’s also about the way institutions make decisions and conduct their operations.”

Despite some progress in relations with public stakeholders, Bradlow says, the IMF’s consultations with civil society and groups outside the traditional decision-making process remain informal. As a result, one cannot be confident that they will take place in all relevant instances.

What is more, the Fund has yet to state openly and explicitly exactly how it will decide what information to make public and when. “The lack of certainty undermines confidence in the publication policy,” Bradlow says.

He adds that he suspects the Fund and its shareholding governments of shuffling the deck: Disclosing a growing body of relatively ‘safe’ information while moving sensitive information to confidential oral or written side-agreements.

“Until we are proven wrong, it seems to me it’s prudent to assume that this practice is taking place,” he says.

Reformers also have urged the IMF to release minutes of board meetings so the public can see how the agency’s executive directors – a group of 24 representatives of shareholding governments – make decisions.

This information would include the outcome of any votes, so parliaments and people could be sure that their representatives’ private votes were consistent with their public positions. IMF insiders and critics alike long have said board members say one thing in public, often to mollify constituents, only to do the opposite behind closed doors.

“The Fund, like all bureaucracies, still maintains itself as more closed than many would want,” the IMF’s Dawson acknowledges. “I am sure pressure will be kept on us for more openness and I think that’s fine. But I also think there are limits to how open the Fund can in fact be.”

For example, he rules out any possibility that the agency would expose itself to claims for reparation from parties alleging grievances stemming from Fund programmes or policy advice. Some groups – notably the French non-governmental Agir Ici, have demanded an appeals mechanism to hear the complaints of people claiming to have been harmed by IMF policies.

Like the United Nations and World Bank, Dawson says, the IMF is an international treaty organisation immune to litigation.

“The principle of not airing our dirty laundry in public is still evident,” he adds. “But that doesn’t mean that our decisions shouldn’t be reviewed at a later time, honestly and independently and openly. Without that we have no basis of learning from our experiences.”