IMF Committed to Providing Stability, Macroeconomic Balance and Agility as Global Economy Reconfigures

By Godson Ikoro

As the world economy, reconfigures with many countries reassessing their approaches, in the face of structural transformations in technology, demographics, and energy, the IMF can help steady the ship as the world navigates choppy waters.

The Fund’s Deputy Managing Director Nigel Clarke stated this in a keynote speech at a Symposium on the Future of International Cooperation on the 80th Anniversary of the End of World War II in Tokyo at the weekend.

In order to achieve this, he said the IMF’s work will be crucial in the areas of stability, growth, macroeconomic balance, and agility.

According to him, “in a tightly interconnected world, stability matters to everybody”.
His words:
“Our mandate to promote international monetary cooperation sits at the heart of what we do, and has never mattered more than now, after 80 years of ever-closer integration.
Like a fireman who douses a fire in one house and thus saves the neighborhood, when the IMF helps stabilize one country, it helps all others—we know how easily something small can become something big.”

**Nigel Clark,Deputy Managing Director, IMF**

He pointed out that growth requires stability and stability requires growth, and that stability also requires global macroeconomic balance”.

“As the global system reconfigures, agility will be key,” Clarke emphasized.

He recalled that already in recent years, as geoeconomic fragmentation set in, many countries coalesced into groupings of common interest. While the trend continues, with an increasing emphasis on regional trade and regional financing arrangements, Clark averred that” in a variable-geometry world, the IMF will respond as needed, flexibly, including to serve regional needs and explore ways to strengthen the global financial safety net for the good of all.”

The Fund, he contended,” is a seasoned repository of knowledge on how to do this, and so we shall remain. Whether it be crisis prevention through surveillance, crisis management through policy advice and lending, or resilience through capacity development, stability will remain our core mission. This means helping countries to design well phased and well communicated plans for budget consolidation; to maintain effective monetary policies to contain inflation; to safeguard external stability; to ensure financial systems are robust; and much more. This is our bread and butter.”Clark enthused.