NULL

A recovery is underway, but the economic fallout from the global pandemic could be with us for years to come. With the crisis exacerbating prepandemic vulnerabilities, country prospects are diverging. Nearly half of emerging market and developing economies and some middle-income countries are now at risk of falling further behind, undoing much of the progress made toward achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The Bank and Fund are the only two international financial institutions with near universal membership. They have an important role to play in providing global public goods and in helping countries obtain the benefits of globalization, as well as handle the pressures it creates. While the Bank and Fund have separate mandates, they are inherently linked and close collaboration is vital. Indeed, the costs to members of poor collaboration would be significant. Although there are many examples of good collaboration and there have been clear improvements over the years, there is scope for further improvements in the view of the Committee.

Annotation This book brings together different perspectives on the role of conditionality, drawing on the experiences and lessons learned by the donor community, NGO critics and academic circles, and the borrowing countries, and provides a board overview of contemporary approaches to conditionality in today's aid architecture.

African countries need to improve the performance of their public sectors if they are going to achieve their goals of growth, poverty reduction, and the provision of better services for their citizens. Between 1995 and 2004, the Bank provided some $9 billion in lending and close to $900 million in grants and administrative budget to support public sector capacity building in Africa. This evaluation assesses Bank support for public sector capacity building in Africa over these past 10 years. It is based on six country studies, assessments of country strategies and operations across the Region, and review of the work of the World Bank Institute, the Institutional Development Fund, and the Bank-supported African Capacity Building Foundation.

Selected Decisions and Selected Documents of the International Monetary Fund includes decisions, interpretations, and resolutions of the Executive Board and Board of Governors of the IMF, as well as selected documents to which frequent reference is made in the current activities of the Fund. In addition, it includes certain documents pertaining to the relations between the Fund and other international organizations.

Weighing up the costs and benefits of economic interdependence in a finance-driven world, this book argues that globalization, understood and promoted as absolute freedom for all forms of capital, has been oversold to the Global South, and that the South should be as selective about globalization as the North. ‘Liberalization, Financial Instability and Economic Development’ challenges the orthodoxy on the link between financial deepening and economic growth, as well as that between the efficiency of financial markets and the benefits of liberalization. Ultimately, the author urges developing countries to control capital flows and asset bubbles, preventing financial fragility and crises, and recommends regional policy options for managing capital flows and exchange rates.

Today's international development financing system seems like a collection of disjointed entities that often work at cross purposes without being able to mobilize enough finance for developing countries in their efforts to reduce poverty and improve living standards. This book brings together the vast array of new initiatives in financing mechanisms and proposals to transform the development finance architecture. Based on four different scenarios for the next ten-year period, proposals are made for how to reach an effective system.

The book analyses the development of international standards for countering terrorist financing from the perspective of international criminal law. It is likely to find its value for readers not only as a monograph on the financing of terrorism but also as a reference book on the operational and theoretical development of anti-money laundering strategy following 9/11. In particular, the works of main actors in this area such as the UN Security Council, Financial Action Task Force, IMF, World Bank, and APG are dealt with in depth.

This paper focuses on the fact that the 2004–2005 conditionality review expands to include a review of the application of the new Guidelines on Conditionality, adopted in 2002. These guidelines were the culmination of a comprehensive and far-reaching review of conditionality that aimed to enhance the effectiveness of IMF-supported programs. They represented the first revision of the IMF’s conditionality guidelines since 1979, and were developed by the IMF after seeking input from civil society and public forums held in several countries. This review comes at an early stage of experience with the new guidelines, and further evidence will be needed before definite conclusions can be drawn. The ultimate test of conditionality is whether it contributes to better economic outcomes, including over the medium term, and these cannot yet be gauged. Moreover, although this review draws in part on case studies, no substitute exists for cross-country analysis for identifying broad trends, and at this stage such analysis is hampered by small sample sizes.