Agence France Presse / Nathaniel Harrison
WASHINGTON, Sept 17 (AFP) - Sober-suited World Bank and IMF policymakers open an annual round of discussions next week in Prague, where their projections of flourishing global growth will be bitterly dismissed by protesters who insist the two institutions do more harm than good.
"The outlook for the world economy is the best we have seen in over a decade," International Monetary Fund executive director Horst Koehler said in a recent speech here.
IMF staff economists foresee a 4.75 percent expansion in global growth this year, up from 3.3 percent in 1999.
The IMF's just-released annual report found that Asian economies staggered by a financial crisis in 1997-1998 are fast recovering and that Russia too is on the mend.
Japan meanwhile is showing signs of emerging from recession, activity has picked up in Europe and Brazil and the United States appears headed for a non-inflationary "soft landing" after years of soaring growth.
As a result, said an IMF senior official, "the environment for discussions in Prague is favorable and we can work for a further implementation of reforms and structural change."
But on the streets of the Czech capital, the environment is likely to be anything but favorable to the policymaking committees of the Bank and the IMF, which convene September 24 and 25 respectively after several ministerial sessions.
Czech authorities are bracing for demonstrations by an estimated 20,000 protesters who accuse the Bank and the Fund of trampling on the rights of the poor, catering to big business and pursuing polices that degrade the environment.
Organizers hope to build on the fervor generated by protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle last December and by demonstrations here in April that disrupted World Bank-IMF meetings.
"The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund claim to be working to eliminate poverty but their real purpose is to force developing nations to embrace corporate gloabalization," said Njoki Njoroge Njehu, head of the Washington-based 50 Years is Enough Network.
"The result is the rampant abuse of workers' rights and the environment and the further impoverishment of the very people the World Bank and the IMF purport to help."
Activists here say US groups will be sparsely represented in Prague, preferring instead to stage solidarity activities in 50 US cities on or around September 26.
The protesters have clearly gotten their message over police barricades and into the halls of power at the Bank and the IMF -- to the exent that World Bank president James Wolfensohn has said that "what happens in the streets" will constitute "the other agenda" in Prague.
"There is concern and great uncertainty about what is going to happen," acknowledged IMF first deputy managing director Stanley Fischer, who said IMF officials have been working closely with Czech authorities to ensure that the meetings take place as scheduled.
"We're trying to move in the direction of making ... the global economy work for all," Fischer maintained, "and I think that what we are doing is constructive. Holding up these meetings doesn't exactly enhance the goals of making globalization more manageable."
The Prague sessions will focus on measures to support the fight against AIDS, reduce the debt burden of the world's poorest nations and close the digital divide, according to a World Bank spokesman.
IMF policymakers, mandated to deal with more theoretical macroeconomic questions, are expected to debate efforts to improve financial institutions in member countries, as well as the need for rich nations to take in more exports from the developing world.
Since the Asian financial crisis, during which the Bank and the Fund came in for harsh criticism in the US Congress and elsewhere, the two instituions have begun to change the way they do business.
They have both sought to tie debt relief for poor countries more closely to commitments from local governments to apply the savings directly to poverty reduction.
In the face of protests from developing nations, they are considering changes in procedures to choose the Bank president and the IMF managing director, who have always come from the United States and Europe and who have always been male.
And in the interests of transparency, the IMF now identifies its country contributors by name and amount as well as the salaries of its top management.:
