Spotlight on Today's Global Challenges

Meetings brought together over 11,500 participants High-level panels discussed key issues ranging from gender equality to technology. Improving economic participation prominent message throughout meetings Every year, the IMF and World Bank bring together key thought leaders and policymakers to tackle today’s most pressing global challenges at the Annual Meetings.

The Cost of Corruption: Youth Perspectives #IMFYouth

Corruption can undermine the incentives of young people to get a good education and therefore limits their access to jobs, the panelists said. Corruption can also undercut a country’s efforts to promote inclusive growth and can lead to poverty and inequality.

Panelists agreed that governments should help youth become more engaged in fighting corruption by promoting a culture of openness and transparency. “Leadership really makes a difference in my view,” said IMF General Counsel Sean Hagan. “You have to have good role models. You have to have people who lead by example,” he added.

Technology, Innovation, and Inclusive Growth #NewEcon

Technological change has the potential to transform the lives of people around the world for the better, but it will be important to get the formula right or the digital divide will grow, panelists said at this seminar. “Whether we’re talking about big data, the Internet of Things, digitization, or 3D printing, the technological revolution is reaching deep into every sector of our economies,” IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said in opening remarks. The Fund needs to pair with technology experts to gain a deeper understanding of the impact of technological change, she added.

Panelist Leila Janah, Founder and CEO of the nonprofit Sama, cautioned that “while we’re seeing massive gains for many people, we’re also seeing at the very bottom a stagnation, which has led to unrest.” Policymakers should consider distributional policies such as a basic income for people who will inevitably be left behind, she said.

Read more in the IMF news story , watch the webcast, and check out F&D magazine on technology.

The current scale of infrastructure investment is not sufficient to meet the needs of developing economies, panelists said at this seminar. Despite a broad increase in such investment in developing countries since 2000, “our infrastructure deficit is huge,” said Kemi Adeosun, Minister of Finance of Nigeria. “Even if we devoted all of our budget to infrastructure for the next five years, we can’t plug the infrastructure gap,” she said.

Panelists pointed out that governance was crucial for improving the investment climate. Paul Collier, a Professor at the University of Oxford, stressed that “public monopoly utilities should be commercially run with no access to government funding” because they deter private investment. IMF Deputy Managing Director Mitsuhiro Furusawa noted that the IMF is helping countries strengthen public investment management. The Fund has several tools to assess the financial implications of public investment, while safeguarding debt sustainability and macroeconomic stability, Furusawa said.

Women’s economic empowerment and equality “is one of the key challenges of our time,” IMF First Deputy Managing Director David Lipton said as he introduced this seminar. He reiterated the five specific actions the IMF will take to close the gender gap which IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde outlined at the September 2016 meeting of the UN High-Level Panel on Women's Economic Empowerment.

Panelists said closing gender gaps involved more than increasing women’s labor force participation. They also said many economic measures fail to capture the vast amounts of unpaid work by women. One pressing need is for better data and statistics, according to Rwanda’s Finance Minister, Claver Gatete. Priority can be given to policies that close gender gaps when countries can assess positive and negative outcomes accurately, he noted. New technology also creates avenues for improving women’s economic participation, especially by broadening access to education, training, and mobile banking services.

ActionAid’s Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda urged that women’s equality be defined broadly, not only as an issue of economic growth but also as a shared commitment to improve the well-being of everyone, especially the most vulnerable.

Watch the webcast and visit the IMF’s Genderpage and view ActionAid International’s video.

Fiscal Policy in the New Normal #IMFonFiscal

Fiscal policy is a crucial instrument for supporting near-term growth, while ensuring medium-term sustainability, said panelists at the seminar on Fiscal Policy in the New Normal.

According to Ledger Schuknecht, Chief Economist in Germany’s Ministry of Finance, how fiscal space is used is an important consideration. However, there are political and institutional constraints on the implementation of fiscal policy. Brad DeLong, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, said “national communities and national boundaries constrain us today in ways that are perhaps not the wisest.” India’s Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian argued the case for greater public investment as more compelling in advanced economies, but said the political systems in these countries appear to be unable to deliver this.

IMF’s Fiscal Affairs Department Director Vitor Gaspar said fiscal policy to support long-term growth is very much about political economy. He summed up, referencing Franz Kafka’s short story, A Country Doctor: “Diagnosis is easy; to find an understanding with people is hard.”

International monetary institutions created in the 1940s face a host of challenging modern problems, from climate change to abrupt shifts in capital flows across borders, according to former policymakers from Asia who spoke at this IMF seminar.

On whether the so-called global financial safety net is strong enough, Barry Eichengreen, Professor, University of California, Berkeley, said that resources have grown compared with liabilities. But he said one way to make the safety net stronger would to be to make permanent the bilateral swap arrangements adopted during the crisis. The panelists concurred that such swap lines––extended by major central banks to provide temporary liquidity to other central banks––could also be broadened to include more countries by conducting them via the IMF.