Well, the EU/U.S. lock on the IMF and World Bank continues – what a shock (not). The new chief has promised to restructure the IMF to allow more developing countries a larger voice, but a lot of people have doubts about follow-through.

At the same time, borrowers are going to other lenders these days, particularly since creditor nations like China do not attach onerous conditions to loans.

Even as the IMF strives to reflect a
distribution of economic power very different from
the Western-dominated world in which it was born,
it also is seeking to forge new relationships with
emerging and poorer economies that shun its loans
because of the austere macroeconomic policy
prescriptions that come with the money.

The other day I spoke to several people in the development biz – public and private. We talked about bilateral ties between China and Africa, particularly some of the large infrastructure projects. These are now completely bypassing the World Bank system – one recent road project in Africa was negotiated and announced to the public without ever being disclosed to World Bank officials, who must be feeling marginalized these days.

This has been argued many times in the past (particularly since 1998 with respect to the IMF), but I'll raise the question again: is there still a compelling case for the existence of an IMF and/or World Bank?

For some background, here is something from the Asia Times.

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