July 18-19, 2008

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

• Agenda
• Participants
• Waterloo Report

Meeting Objectives

The timing of the workshop is highly pertinent. To date, the debate about International Monetary Fund (IMF) reform has been shaped largely by conversations within and among OECD countries and orthodox or mainstream economists. This project proposes to remedy this imbalance to the debate. Over the past year, CIGI, New Rules for Global Finance, and Oxford University’s Global Economic Governance Programme have been sponsoring a series of regional meetings that would enable developing countries to articulate their needs and priorities for future services from the IMF. We have brought together former and current finance ministers, central bank governors, academics, and stakeholders from each of the regions to discuss in small and intimate settings the kinds of monetary cooperation that would benefit their region most and what role the IMF would or would not play in achieving these ends.

We have held five meetings that covered Asia, Central Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The findings of these meetings have been interesting and we would like to share and discuss these findings with you and others interested in the future of global monetary relations in our Waterloo meeting. The purpose of these regional meetings and the convening conference is to influence the policy process.

As you may know, the Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) is conducting an evaluation of the IMF's interactions with its member countries (the draft issues note can be found at http://www.ieo-imf.org/pub/issues.html). The evaluation seeks to answer whether the interactions have been effective and well-managed. Members of the team undertaking the evaluation will be at the conference, and we hope to hear from them as well as contribute to their work, which when finalized, will be presented to the IMF's Executive Board and published. A subgroup, headed by New Rules for Global Finance, will also meet in the Fall with representatives of the US presidential candidates, on the assumption that some reforms require the positive engagement of the US President.