§286ll Fund Policy Changes

Summary

Require the U.S. Treasury to tell the U.S. representative at the IMF to push for making the IMF pay more attention to poverty, social progress, and the environment in its work. The IMF should build poverty and environmental goals into all its programs and consultations. Countries that get IMF help and also borrow from the World Bank or IDA should prepare a Policy Framework Paper that lists the main poverty, economic, and social actions they will take. Having that paper must be a condition for new IMF lending. The IMF should consider a country’s commitment to those actions when deciding to lend, work with the World Bank to check how well the actions are working, and add environmental concerns and natural-resource accounting into its programs and national income reports where appropriate. Require regular checks and more openness. The IMF must do periodic audits that review its poverty and environmental advice, see if goals were met, and study social and environmental effects; these audits can look at programs country by country and should be made public when possible. The IMF should set rules so reforms help the poor take part in the economy. It must create public-access rules for information, while protecting confidential material; Policy Framework Papers and mission documents should be released at the right time. Each year, the National Advisory Council’s report must say what U.S. officials did to push these ideas and how much progress the IMF has made. The Treasury must also urge the IMF to find ways to include key national ministries and outside experts from borrowing countries in making IMF programs and to report on that effort.