Monday, February 1, 2010

What Are The Roles And Responsibilities Of The International Monetary Fund?

By Jack Wagon

The IMF is the sub organisation of the United Nations Organisation. It is responsible for the promotion of monetary cooperation, and the international trade. It was founded in the year 1945 at the United Nations Monetary and financial Conference. Currently, it has 186 nation-members.

It carries out its activities by surveillance, lending, and technical assistance. The surveillance includes the partnership between the international monetary fund (IMF), and its member nations. It offers a detailed advice, and helps them to formulate strong, and workable economic policies after assessing the economic status of the members. The lending function involves the provision of financial aid to the needy countries on low interest rates. Along with this, it also offers technical assistance in the fields like banking, fiscal, and economic as well as exchange rate policies. It is playing a great role in helping the member nations to fight against the threats of terrorism.

The biggest responsibility of international monetary fund is to even out the world currencies, and to devise plans of economic adjustment for the nations that need an economic reorganisation. The membership of IMF is available to the nations who agree to abide by the terms regulated by the board. The major obligatory terms include avoiding the manipulation of exchange rates, and abstaining from the discriminatory currency practices.

It emphasises on an orderly management and adjustment of the exchange rates. The adjustments play an active role to provide assistance to the developing countries to meet with the heavy exchange demands that are imposed by the high import prices, declining export earnings and development programs.

Due to the roles and the responsibilities of the international monetary fund, there has been great improvement in preventing the castigatory currency devaluation, and trade limitations, which have been the major cause of the economic depression. To put it more simply, the role of international monetary fund is to create a financial and economic stability. The purpose of Economic stability is about giving breathing room to the countries. Therefore, a programme coupled with IMF financing is designed by the national authorities to mediate financial stability.

IMF is playing an active role in reducing poverty in the third world counties or the under developed countries. It is working independently or in cooperation with the World Bank and other organizations. Its programs include the poverty reduction and growth facility (PRGF) and debt relief to the heavily indebted countries (HIPC).

It resourcefully addresses the balance-of-payment difficulty. Any member facing this difficulty can pertain to the IMF for the essential foreign currency from reserves. The member may well use this foreign exchange for the phase of five years, and then return the money back to IMF possessions. The benefit of using these possessions is that IMF offers low market rates of interest for using these finances.

In the year 2000, the managing director and the members of the IMF settled on several leading policies that included the endorsement of the persistent non-inflationary economic growth, enhancement in the stability of the international finance system and pondering over the core macroeconomic and financial areas. Moreover, keeping in view the situation of the global economy in the next few years, IMF has pre planned and has started making the arrangements to add to its resources.

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