Get an inside look at the IMF-World Bank meetings as finance leaders navigate a geopolitically fragmented world #NewsUnitedStates

According to International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, countries need to relearn how to work together to achieve mutual prosperity.

But with finance ministers and central bank governors descending upon Washington this week for the IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings, there may only be time for a crash course in cooperation, as they will need to tackle challenges ranging from inflation to debt crises and beyond.

To gauge whether delegates can revive the spirit of cooperation in this geopolitically fragmented moment, we’ve sent our experts to the center of the action in Foggy Bottom. Below are their insights, in addition to takeaways from our conversations with financial leaders outlining the global economy’s outlook for the coming years.

What’s behind the IMF and World Bank’s data dance-off

Dispatch from IMF-World Bank Week: What you won’t see on the agenda, and why it matters

All eyes on China as IMF-World Bank Week gets underway

The IMF needs to find its geopolitical bearing

The IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings in 2024: Five important issues to be addressed

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What’s behind the IMF and World Bank’s data dance-off

It’s opening day of the annual meetings and there seems to be a new field of (friendly) competition between the IMF and the World Bank: data. 

The Bank has evicted its swag store from the prime real estate at the atrium’s front entrance to the lower level (C1, just by the cafeteria entrance), swapping it with an interactive data exhibition complete with a supersized display of real-time indicators and statistics across its priority work areas such as gender, food and agriculture, electricity, the International Development Association, and corporate outcomes, courtesy of the Bank’s Scorecard launched at the Spring Meetings this year. There are large interactive touch screen monitors, too.

For its part, the IMF has set up a slightly less conspicuous stand on the second floor of HQ1, where it’s touting its new—and improved—portal. The updated platform consolidates data and statistics from fragmented sites across the Fund, including data.imf.org, DataMapper, the Regional Economic Outlooks, and the World Economic Outlook (WEO)—but don’t go looking for the latest WEO yet, which will be released tomorrow. The goal is that the data will be easier to find and, arguably more importantly, that it will be easier to use the Fund’s data to inform decision making, policy, and investments.

Truth be told, the IMF and World Bank’s data and research are complementary. And of course, emphasizing the importance of data and evidence is not new to either Bretton Woods institution, as both of their mandates include providing evidence-based advice, and they regularly publish statistics and analyses, research, and visualizations of their data. Both participate in data generation and data sharing initiatives. The Bank, for example, is a member of the United Nations-led Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, and both the Bank and the Fund are part of the Development Data Partnership along with a variety of multilaterals, international organizations, and companies.

Perhaps as multilateral reform efforts hit stride, pushing new data platforms and putting them on such display is an effort to signal or amplify to the broader development, economic, and finance communities that these institutions are even more committed to data-driven impact, open for data business, and keen to engage. As a believer in “you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” this data nerd is here for it.

PS: Check out the Atlantic Council’s Econographics for our data-driven analyses and visualizations.

Dispatch from IMF-World Bank Week: What you won’t see on the agenda, and why it matters

The world’s financial leaders are descending on Washington this week for the IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings, but one of the most important issues for the future of the global economy won’t be on the official agenda.  

While China’s economy, debt relief, and slowing inflation will all be at the top of the agenda for ministers, what everyone wants to talk about is the US election. They have good reason. The outcome will determine the trajectory on trade policy and tariffs in the world’s largest economy and may impact who is selected as the next Federal Reserve chair (Jay Powell’s term is up in 2026). It will also tell the world how the United States plans to engage—or not—in international economic collaboration over the next four years. 

There is a reason why the US Treasury’s Jay Shambaugh has been arguing (as he did at the Atlantic Council last week) that the world needs the Bretton Woods institutions—and that without them, there would be a giant “IMF-shaped vacuum” in the global economy. He’s concerned that as the institutions mark their eightieth birthday, many around the world have forgotten why they were created in the first place. 

It wasn’t only the ravages of World War II that forced the delegates in New Hampshire to build a new international financial architecture: It was also the trade wars of the 1930s, including the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and retaliatory tit-for-tat tariffs, which prolonged and deepened the Great Depression. 

I was in the room last week when IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, in her curtain-raiser speech ahead of the meetings, said trade was “exhibit one” of where the global economy can do better. For an institution that has a reputation for being focused on fiscal policy (the old joke is that IMF stands for “it’s mostly fiscal”), it was a telling choice. She knows, as does everyone coming to Washington this week, that the decision made by the American people on November 5 will impact every economy in the world. 

It may not be on the official agenda, but you can bet we’ll be diving into the election this week.

All eyes on China as IMF-World Bank Week gets underway

One of the many big questions looming over the IMF and World Bank this week is how they will assess China’s recent efforts to revive its sagging economy. Faced with the challenging combination of a property crisis, deflation, a mountain of local-government debt, rising youth unemployment, and plummeting business and consumer confidence, Beijing has announced a series of efforts aimed at boosting growth. But so far, those measures seem to be falling short of what is needed, as I write this week.

No doubt, many officials and analysts will be looking to Tuesday’s release of the World Economic Outlook to gauge how the IMF assesses China’s shifting policies. Last week’s curtain-raiser speech for the meetings from IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva was silent on the subject, but in an interview with Reuters, she did hint at some concern about the course that Beijing is charting. She said that China’s economy has become too big for Chinese policymakers to continue relying on exports to drive growth. Instead, she said, China needs to shift toward reliance on consumption. Without such a shift, she said, China’s annual growth could fall below 4 percent in the medium term (compared with the government’s current target of “around 5 percent”). Such an outcome, Georgieva told Reuters, “is going to be very difficult for China. It’s going to be very difficult from a social standpoint.”

The most recent IMF forecast, released in May, projected 5 percent growth for China this year and 4.5 percent in 2025. But the Fund’s call for more domestic consumption, which has been a constant theme for the past decade, seems increasingly out of step with the direction of Chinese economic policy, which has been prioritizing the development of high-tech industries while brushing off criticism of rising exports.

Read more on China’s economy

The IMF needs to find its geopolitical bearing

The following is an abridged version of a recent article in Econographics. Read the full version here.

At the IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings, Western delegates should think hard about how the financial and intellectual capital invested in the Bretton Woods institutions can be put to better use in the interests of democracies around the world.

The World Bank’s case is relatively straightforward (it needs more financing and efficient project implementation), while the IMF’s case is more complicated. The fund saw a major shift of its activities into climate and development lending in recent years, requiring several rounds of fundraising to increase its basic capital (or quotas) and build up trust funds to provide subsidized loans to lower-income members.

These efforts have recently borne fruit, allowing the fund to lower its lending rate for the poorest member countries. However, the IMF is increasingly running into budget constraints among its larger members, and it will need to push for better lending results. It should insist on more thorough debt restructurings before concluding programs with countries, many of which are mired in (Chinese-held) debt; some of those countries are both frequent IMF customers and known to quickly forget the promises made at the time their lending programs were concluded, spelling financial trouble. The United States and other Group of Seven (G7) countries, as the main creditors of the IMF, have the most to lose if the institution continues to extend loans that put its own balance sheet at risk.

The IMF will also need to sharpen its policy messages. Its role in economic surveillance has moved to the background in recent years, although its reports and pieces on geopolitical fragmentation (including the semi-annual World Economic Outlook) still attract interest. But the policy conclusions in those reports and policies often disappoint. For example, a recent blog post downplayed the impact that Chinese subsidies and trade practices have on strategic sectors and how those practices would provide China with advantages in a further intensification of geopolitical tensions.

The IMF’s main shareholders should therefore use the Annual Meetings to lean on the IMF to refocus its resources on where they could be most useful at this time—freeing up its excellent staff to analyze economic trends and develop useful policy solutions in an environment of geopolitical rivalry. Democratic countries around the world need its work and its independent voice more than ever.

The IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings in 2024: Five important issues to be addressed

The world’s finance ministers and central bank governors will be confronted with a very complex and difficult situation—including five important issues they must address. Despite intense geopolitical contention that has stymied international cooperation on many fronts, there is a chance that the gathering could lead to agreements to stabilize a volatile global economy. It is important such an opportunity not be missed.

1. Policy coordination to ensure a global soft landing

Major countries’ economies, including those of the United States, China, and many in Europe are in similar, negative cyclical circumstances. They share a common interest to engineer soft landings for their economies as headline inflation rates slow despite persistent services inflation, and employment growth weakens while unemployment rates rises. China has been particularly mired in deflation. Its gross domestic product (GDP) price deflator—a comprehensive measurement of price changes—has remained in negative territory for five consecutive quarters, amid a balance sheet slowdown triggered by a property sector crisis. All the major countries could benefit from coordinating their stimulative policy measures to generate positive feedback effects.

Doing so would be an opportune moment for the Group of Twenty (G20)—which will gather during the annual meetings—to deliver on their mission as the premier forum for international policy coordination. They could start by agreeing on a set of measures—such as coordinated easing moves—to ensure a soft landing for the global economy. In particular, interest rate cuts announced by major central banks, especially the US Federal Reserve (the Fed), would revive bond flows to emerging, developing economies. The IMF can play a catalytic role in this endeavor by providing analytical support for coordinated monetary easing coupled with appropriately supporting fiscal policy measures. At the same time, it should safeguard government debt sustainability where necessary. After all, a soft landing is the base case scenario in the IMF’s latest growth estimates, which show global GDP growing at 3.2 percent and CPI slowing to 5.9 percent in 2024.

Read the other four big issues on the docket

Further reading

Image: World Bank President Ajay Banga and International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva attend a signing ceremony with Thailand to host the 2026 IMF and the World Bank annual meetings on the last day of the meeting, following last month’s deadly earthquake, in Marrakech, Morocco, October 15, 2023. REUTERS/Susana Vera