The event took place in Washington within the framework of the Spring Meetings, gathering 40 people involved in debt issues. The attendance included officials (World Bank, IMF and EU among others) and civil society representatives from North and South. Beyond the apparently non-controversial title the round-table dealt with the issues of odious debt and illegitimate debt. This certainly implies some progress, given the fact that, so far, such a discussion had not been accepted in this kind of spaces. Citizen debt movements have long been insisting on its importance and struggling to include it in the agenda.
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On Feb. 4, 2008, news came over the wires from Rome that the World Bank had appointed Robert Briner to head up an arbitration tribunal to decide yet another claim against the Argentine government, this time by Italian corporate lawyers. The arbitration will take place in the Washington, DC-based "International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes" (ICSID), an obscure World Bank arbitration forum. Obscure that is, outside of Latin America. While mention of the ICSID in London or New York will likely elicit confused stares, in La Paz or Buenos Aires it could well provoke a string of expletives.
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El Salvador is one of the most interesting cases showing how middle-income countries can profit from and be committed to the principles of Paris Declaration. El Salvador has not signed the Paris Declaration yet and is not very aid dependent, but still some good practices are being drawn up. Although there is no PRSP, as such, the national policy for poverty reduction receives external funding through budget support from the European Commission and Spain, and some other donors are working under the lead of El Salvador government to foster new alignment and harmonisation processes. (pdf format)
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After several postponements over the year 2007, the Bank of the South was formally created in Buenos Aires on December 9, 2007, when the presidents of the seven countries signed its founding charter. At that time, a 60-day deadline was established for the member countries to define the Bank's Articles of Incorporation. However, it was only recently, on April 25, 2008, in a meeting held in Montevideo that the matter was taken up again by the members. These suspensions and delays may be justified by some important differences that exist among the countries involved in the bank’s founding process and which constitute key factors in this sense. (pdf format)
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As the International Monetary Fund (IMF) continues to face escalating deficits and a crisis of credibility, almost a quarter of its 2,400 full-time staff in Washington, D.C. have voluntarily applied for resignations. An IMF information notice reported that the actual number of buyout requests was as high as 620, far in excess of the institution’s goal of laying off 380 staff.
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The poor have been given a little more say in the IMF. The rich countries have so far had 60.57 percent of voting rights in the IMF. The approved reform reduces that to 57.93 percent. For many developing countries and NGOs this is still not enough, but it is the biggest single change in voting rights in favour of developing countries in the IMF, which was set up in 1946.
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