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Fondo Monetario.Indd 1 05/10/11 14:44 Fondo Monetario.Indd 2 05/10/11 14:44 Biblioteca INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND and WORLD BANK Fondo Monetario.indd 1 05/10/11 14:44 Fondo Monetario.indd 2 05/10/11 14:44 Biblioteca INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND AND WORLD BANK Fondo Monetario.indd 3 05/10/11 14:44 UNIVERSIDAD VERACRUZANA Raúl Arias Lovillo Rector Porfirio Carrillo Castilla Secretario Académico Víctor Aguilar Pizarro Secretario de Administración y Finanzas Agustín del Moral Tejeda Director General Editorial Fondo Monetario.indd 4 05/10/11 14:44 Samuel Lichtensztejn INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND AND WORLD BANK: Instruments of Financial Power Traducción de Arsinoé Orihuela Ochoa Biblioteca Xalapa, Ver., México 2011 5 Fondo Monetario.indd 5 05/10/11 14:44 Diseño de portada: David Medina. Clasificación LC: HG3881.5.158 L52 15 2011 Clasif. Dewey: 332.152 Autor: Lichtensztejn, Samuel, 1934- Título: International Monetary Fund and World Bank : instruments of financial power / Samuel Lichtensztejn. Edición: Primera edición. Pie de imprenta: Xalapa, Veracruz : Universidad Veracruzana, 2011. Descripción física: 236 p. ; 21 cm. Serie: (Biblioteca) Nota: Bibliografía: p. 229-236. ISBN: 9786075021140 Materias: Fondo Monetario Internacional. Banco Mundial. Finanzas internacionales. DGBUV 2011/42 Primera edición, 23 de septiembre de 2011 © Universidad Veracruzana Dirección General Editorial Hidalgo 9, Centro, Xalapa, Veracruz Apartado postal 97, C. P. 91000 [email protected] Tel/fax (228) 818 59 80, 818 13 88 ISBN: 978-607-502-114-0 Impreso en México Printed in Mexico Fondo Monetario.indd 6 05/10/11 14:44 To the women of my life: My mother, Raquel Teszler My wife, Liliana Kusnir My daughter, Gabriela Fondo Monetario.indd 7 05/10/11 14:44 SPECIAL THANKS To my assistant, Carolina Fortuno for her valuable collabora- tion. To Eugenia Correa and Alicia Girón for encouraging this work. Especially, to my friend, Rector Raúl Arias Lovillo, for his permanent support and solidarity. Fondo Monetario.indd 8 05/10/11 14:44 FOREWORD This book is about the functioning and the political-strategic trajectory that have characterized the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank since their simultaneous crea- tion, including their main historical precedents. This work has as an antecedent the book “International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Strategies and Policies of Financial Power”, writ- ten with Monica Baer’s collaboration in 1985. Twenty five years have passed since then, which has required not only a work of upgrade, but a revision of the increasing literature that on the topic has arisen after several financial crises that stroke the world and, especially, after the onset of the great financial cri- sis in the years 2007-2008. Therefore, hypothesis and perspec- tives have to be reexamined in the light of those critical events. At this point, it seems almost unnecessary to outline an introduction to the Fund and the World Bank or to explain the importance that we attribute to them. At least in Latin America, their given names and initials (especially, the IMF) have acquired a sad popularity, unsuspected if one keeps in mind that hardly some years ago even the acknowledgement of their existence was reserved to very specialized government and academic circles. There are stereotypes, certainly vulgarized, about the role that these international financial institutions have performed. Without a doubt, there is a high load of subjectivity, a sort of prejudice in every work devoted to them. The junctures, the experiences or the selected facts, when not the own titles and expressions used to judge them, translate into a favorable or adverse parti pris. The polarization of standpoints is very 9 Fondo Monetario.indd 9 05/10/11 14:44 frequent. Hence, it becomes virtually impossible to avoid this dichotomy, when, in many circumstances and key moments, the fate and fluctuations experienced by diverse nations and vast social sectors have been greatly influenced by the deci- sions and proposals of these institutions. This work contains without dissimulation a critical vision of the reach and the actions of the financial cooperation sponsored by the IMF and the World Bank, from a Latin American perspec- tive. The purpose in this case, however, was to prevent that this conviction either suggested a drive to easy generalizations or led to ideological simplifications certainly common whenever these topics are approached. Within its possibilities, a permanent objective was to support the ideas referred to with the greatest analytical rigor and the widest available bibliography. In the same line, the investigation was subject to the pre- meditated method of placing and differentiating, in a historical sense, the Fund’s and Bank’s different stages of their thought and their endeavors. It was not due to a meticulous or merely formal stance that we proceeded this way, nor to discover revo- lutionary turns theoretically experienced by both institutions, but rather because it was convenient to analyze and to clarify certain half-truths and deceptive assertions, that are often used against them. For example, that the IMF and the World Bank have not suffered major changes in their official orienta- tions; and that their rigid orthodoxy –as well as the gestation of these international actors– has, unfailingly and faithfully, responded to the dominant interests of the government and the banks of the United States. A central hypothesis of this work refers to the development of these two large financial institutions as a process that has accompanied and contributed to the current globalization of the economic system, that is to say, that has settled in the stage represented by transnational capitalism which arose during 10 Fondo Monetario.indd 10 05/10/11 14:44 the second postwar period and most recently in the midst of the expansion of financial capitalism during the last four deca- des. However, this internationalization of the capitalist system did not follow a lineal evolution but rather, to say the least, it has known three very marked instances: long expansion up to the late 60s, critical transition in most of the 70s and relentless crisis since the early 80s up to the present. In this very last period, without ignoring their previous management, it was when, as never before, the IMF and the World Bank acquired a key presence in the design of strategies and economic poli- cies for Latin American countries as well as for some of the so-called emerging Asian countries and former-socialist coun- tries in Europe. Also, like never before in the present period, it is clear that the spirit of Bretton Woods, under which both institutions were created, has vanished and that there isn’t an international platform of consensus to replace it. In fact, the distance that is perceived between the sixtieth- fifth annual joint meeting of the IMF and the World Bank that took place in Washington, D.C in October 2010 and the foun- ding event of Bretton Woods is not a mere consequence of the elapsed time that separates both events, but rather a corollary of the different concerns and aspirations proclaimed as high- priority objectives in one and another case. In the foundational canon encouraged by both the Keynes and White plans, despite the reservations that these might deserve, it was emphatica- lly stated the need for international monetary cooperation to “facilitate the expansion and balanced growth of international trade and to contribute thereby to the promotion and mainte- nance of high levels of employment and real income and to the development of the productive resources of all members… and promote exchange stability.” And this is how it was captured in the IMF’s Articles of Agreement which, in addition, inspired the functions assigned to the World Bank. 11 Fondo Monetario.indd 11 05/10/11 14:44 But already in 1970’s the goal of exchange rate stability faded away and was replaced by the permanent world-scale ins- tability of the dollar standard. In the Baker Plan, announced by the Secretary of the Treasury of the United Sates, James A. Baker III in Seoul in 1985, the strategy was outlined for underdeveloped countries to adopt macroeconomic policies for structural adjustment, a crucial precedent of the Washington Consensus and neoliberal policies whose pernicious consequen- ces have unveiled in the last 15 years in various countries. It was already possible to observe how the original objectives of the IMF and the World Bank were changing. The relations that have historically established the IMF and the World Bank are defined by the complementarity of their theoretical approaches and functions. It has been men- tioned countless times the existence of conflicts between these agencies, either because of their lending policies and conditions or because of the jealous bureaucratic defense of allegedly different conceptions. These disputes, however, have referred mainly to mechanisms of implementation or to circumstantial positions that lack a profound content or a significant implication. In general terms and as time goes by, these institutions have been increasingly binding together with greater vigor and complexity while executing different but convergent functions within the structure of international economic-financial power. From the time of their joint creation in Bretton Woods, a specific division of tasks was put into practice, according to which, in essence, it corresponded to the IMF to assist in the problems of stability and international liquidity, and to the World Bank the problems related to resource allocation for the productive activity of the various member countries. As a result, the operation of the IMF was linked to short-term mone- tary, fiscal and exchange policies, while the Bank focused on 12 Fondo Monetario.indd 12 05/10/11 14:44 the priorities regarding infrastructure, investment and public expense in a mid-term horizon. Until the mid 1960’s, the IMF appeared as the most rele- vant institution in the international financial organization. We were then in an expansionary stage of the world economy, in which the process of accumulation was not facing major pro- blems.
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