The succession of crises that swept over the so called emerging countries in the nineties and the ensuing disastrous IMF and World Bank interventions provoked a world wide debate concerning the future and the role of these Bretton Woods’ institutions. A number of establishment intellectuals played a part in these discussions for instance, Allan Meltzer, Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Jeffrey Sachs. At the same time, Congress in Washington has never been keen to provide additional financial means to the IMF to overcome such crises. All it ended up in doing was setting up an ad hoc bipartisan [1] commission. This commission, entitled the ‘International Financial Institutions Advisory Commission’ delivered its report at the start of 2000. The report focused on seven multilateral institutions: the IMF, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the WTO and the Bank of International Settlements. This study is only concerned with the report’s conclusions concerning the IMF and the World Bank.

The Commission was comprised of eleven experts (six Republicans and five Democrats), parliamentarians, academics and bankers. Among them were Allan H. Meltzer (its president), Edwin Feulner (president of the extremely reactionary Heritage Foundation and former president of the Mont-Pèlerin Society) on the Republican side and Jeffrey Sachs, Fred Bergsten, Jerome Levinson on the Democrats’.

For more informations The Meltzer Commission on the IFI at the US Congress in 2000