The IMF-World Bank mission creep, combined with the abuse of conditionalities by the Bad Samaritan nations, is particularly unacceptable when the policies of the Bretton Woods Institutions have produced slower growth, more unequal income distribution and greater economic instability in most developing countries, as I pointed out earlier in this chapter.
How on earth can the IMF and the World Bank persist for so long in pursuing the wrong policies that produce such poor outcomes? This is because their governance structure severely biases them towards the interests of the rich countries. Their decisions are made basically according to the share capital that a country has (in other words, they have a one-dollar-one-vote system). This means that the rich countries, which collectively control 60% of the voting shares, have an absolute control over their policies, while the US has a de facto veto in relation to decisions in the 18 most important areas.[29]
One result of this governance structure is that the World Bank and the IMF have imposed on developing countries standard policy packages that are considered to be universally valid by the rich countries, rather than policies that are carefully designed for each particular developing country – predictably producing poor results as a consequence. Another result is that, even when their policies may be appropriate, they have often failed because they are resisted by the locals as impositions from outside.
In response to mounting criticisms, the World Bank and the IMF have recently reacted in a number of ways. On the one hand, there have been some window-dressing moves. Thus the IMF now calls the Structural Adjustment Programme the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility Programme, in order to show that it cares about poverty issues, though the contents of the programme have hardly changed from before. On the other hand, there have been some genuine efforts to open dialogues with a wider constituency, especially the World Bank’s engagement with NGOs (non-governmental organizations). But the impacts of such consultation are at best marginal. Moreover, when increasing numbers of NGOs in developing countries are indirectly funded by the World Bank, the value of such an exercise is becoming more doubtful.
The IMF and the World Bank have also tried to increase the ‘local ownership’of their programmes by involving local people in their design. However, this has borne few fruits. Many developing countries lack the intellectual resources to argue against powerful international organizations with an army of highly trained economists and a lot of financial clout behind them. Moreover, the World Bank and the IMF have taken what I call the ‘Henry Ford approach to diversity’ (he once said that a customer could have a car painted ‘any colour … so long as it’s black’). The range of local variation in policies that they find acceptable is very narrow. Also, with the increasing tendency for developing countries to elect or appoint ex-World Bank or ex-IMF officials to key economic posts, ‘local’ solutions are increasingly resembling the solutions provided by the Bretton Woods Institutions.
Completing the Unholy Trinity, the World Trade Organisation was launched in 1995, following the conclusion of the so-called Uruguay Round of the GATT talks. I will discuss the substance of what the WTO does in greater detail in later chapters, so here let me focus just on its governance structure.
The World Trade Organisation has been criticized on a number of grounds. Many believe that it is little more than a tool with which the developed countries pry open developing markets. Others argue that it has become a vehicle for furthering the interests of transnational corporations. There are elements of truth in both of these criticisms, as I will show in later chapters.
But, despite these criticisms, the World Trade Organisation is an international organization in whose running the developing countries have the greatest say. Unlike the IMF or the World Bank, it is ‘democratic’ – in the sense of allowing one country one vote (of course, we can debate whether giving China, with 1.3 billion people, and Luxembourg, with fewer than half a million people, one vote each is really ‘democratic’). And, unlike in the UN, where the five permanent members of the Security Council have veto power, no country has a veto in the WTO. Since they have the numerical advantage, the developing countries count far more in the WTO than they do in the IMF or the World Bank.
Unfortunately, in practice, votes are never taken, and the organization is essentially run by an oligarchy comprising a small number of rich countries. It is reported that, in various ministerial meetings (Geneva 1998, Seattle 1999, Doha 2001, Cancun 2003), all the important negotiations were held in the so-called Green Rooms on a ‘by-invitation-only’ basis. Only the rich countries and some large developing countries that they cannot ignore (e.g., India and Brazil) were invited. Especially during the 1999 Seattle meeting, it was reported that some developing country delegates who tried to get into Green Rooms without invitations were physically thrown out.
But even without such extreme measures, the decisions are likely to be biased towards the rich countries. They can threaten and bribe developing countries by means of their foreign aid budgets or using their influence on the loan decisions by the IMF, the World Bank and ‘regional’ multilateral financial institutions.*
Moreover, there exists a vast gap in intellectual and negotiation resources between the two groups of countries. A former student of mine, who has just left the diplomatic service of his native country in Africa, once told me that his country had only three people, including himself, to attend all the meetings at the WTO in Geneva. The meetings often numbered more than a dozen a day, so he and his colleagues dropped a few meetings altogether and divided up the rest between the three of them. This meant that they could allocate only two to three hours to each meeting. Sometimes they went in at the right moment and made some useful contributions. Some other times, they were not so lucky and got completely lost. In contrast, the US – to take the example at the other extreme – had dozens of people working on intellectual property rights alone. But my former student said, his country was lucky – more than 20 developing countries do not have a single person based in Geneva, and many have to get by with only one or two people. Many more stories like this could be told, but they all suggest that international trade negotiations are a highly lopsided affair; it is like a war where some people fight with pistols while the others engage in aerial bombardment.
Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister who spearheaded the neo-liberal counter-revolution, once famously dismissed her critics saying that ‘There is no alternative’. The spirit of this argument – known as TINA (There Is No Alternative) – permeates the way globalization is portrayed by the Bad Samaritans.
29
The decisions in 18 most important areas at the IMF need a 85% majority. The US happens to own 17.35% of its share. Therefore, it can unilaterally veto any proposal that it does not like. At least three of the next four biggest shareholders are needed in order to block a proposal (Japan with 6. 22%; Germany with 6.08%; Britain or France each with 5.02%). There are also 21 issues that require a 70% majority. This means that any proposal regarding these issues can be defeated if the above-mentioned five biggest shareholders band together against it. See A. Buira (2004), ‘The Governance of the IMF in a Global Economy’, G24 Research Paper, downloadable at http://g24.org/buiragva.pdf
*
These include the Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the African Development Bank (AFDB) and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), which deals with the former communist economies.