With demographic change and globalisation presenting fresh challenges, Rodrigo de Rato explains how the 60-year-old International Monetary Fund is adapting itself to new paradigms.
The IMF recently marked its 60th anniversary. Created toward the end of the Second World War to establish a multilateral framework for trade and finance that would avoid the failings of the inter-war period, the organisation has seen, and adapted to, huge changes in its 60-year history.
Economic and financial globalisation has progressed throughout this period as markets in goods, services and capital have become increasingly integrated.
In such a world, macroeconomic and financial stability is a vitally important public good. Our main focus in the next few years will be on helping countries maximise the benefits, and minimise the costs and risks, of globalisation.
From just 40 countries at the start, the IMF's membership is now nearly global, as first developing countries and then the countries of the former Soviet Union joined. The new countries have faced problems very different from the original members. This has led the IMF to adapt its role in many respects, while remaining true to its original mandate.
In low-income countries, especially in Africa, the fight against poverty has required a focus on helping these countries achieve stronger, sustainable economic growth by helping them build basic economic institutions and conduct economic policy better. In the transition economies, reform of the basic structure of the economy was the pre-occupation for many years, and still is in some countries.
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