A senior International Monetary Fund?(IMF) official has suggested that the organisation’s approach to recommending economic solutions for troubled countries needs to change.
Director of the Western Hemisphere Department of the IMF, Nicolas Eyzaguirre, told the Weekend Nation: “I think everybody has to learn that nobody has got the a mononoply of the truth.
“We did have a big big crisis, the most severe crisis in decades just two years ago, so that suggests that we have to be modest in terms of not believing that we command all the truth, to have an open dialogue with countries, with markets, with agents and understanding what their difficultites are and work together to fix that.”
Eyzaguirre’s comments at a reception hosted by Central Bank Governor Dr De Lisle Worrell at his official residence Wednesday night.
Earlier in the evening, in an informal address to guests from the IMF, the University of the West Indies and the Central Bank of Barbados, Dr Worrell stated: “I do think that there is a tremendous challenge facing economic and financial policymakers in today’s world and I don’t think we are doing a very good job in terms of addressing it.”
The Governor added:?“I think we are still using the old tools and I think that the events of the last three years have said, certainly to me in a very decisive way, that those tools do not match the reality that we face and so we have a big challenge to think of creative ways and very importantly, we have to listen to what the data, to what the reality is telling us.”
Both officials were speaking on the eve of a two-day conference in Barbados initiated by the IMF for dialogue between that body, the University of the West Indies and the Central Bank of Barbados.
Worrell thought such opportunities were “very important for us to think through some of the isues and how to approach the issues with which we have to deal in this increasingly complex and uncertain world”.
Eyzaguirre remarked to the Weekend Nation: “We are not out of the woods yet. The IMF keeps saying much needs to be done to heal the financial sector in advanced economies, predominently Europe, but also to some extent the United States, and as long as those big financial sectors do not get fixed, we still have risks down the road.”
Questioned about the IMF’s perspective on the performance of the Barbados economy specifically, the IMF?official responded:?“We are coming here basically in a listening mode to hear what the scholars of the University of the West indies and the people of the Central Bank of Barbados have to say about your own programmes and also to hear more from your people about what you have say about your own reality.” (GC)
