Senior finance officials on Sunday hailed a robust global economic recovery, albeit one threatened by surging oil prices, but made little headway pushing China toward currency reform and took no firm steps to ease the debt of the world's poorest nations.
Delegates from many of the 184 members of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank wrapped up three days of high-level financial talks that got underway Friday with a gathering of the Group of Seven.
That session saw Chinese officials sitting down for the first time with central bankers and finance ministers from Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States.
World Bank President James Wolfensohn, in a notably blunt speech to the delegates Sunday, scolded world leaders, faulting them for failing to make good on commitments to the poor and of holding regular meetings that yield little more than praise and blame.
"Without greater visible engagement by global leadership, we will not make the breakthroughs we need to ensure real security and peace," he said.
"The way our system works today is that, at a sequence of global meetings, we agree on objectives," after which national governments then set out to meet the objectives, holding another meeting in five years.
"Usually the meeting concludes that we have not achieved our objectives. New targets are set. Blame and praise is attributed and we set out on the next five years," Wolfensohn said. His counterpart at the IMF, managing director Rodrigo Rato, likewise had some sobering words for the session.
The IMF, he asserted, has to learn to say "no" in some cases to crisis-stricken countries to force them toward better economic policies.
"The IMF's loans to Mexico in 1995, to Korea in 1997, and the support in recent years to Brazil and Turkey, are some of the examples from the recent past where large-scale support was appropriate," he told the meeting.
"That said, we also need a Fund that can say 'no.' The prospect of the Fund declining to provide financial support would strengthen the incentives to implement sound policies, thus avoiding the need for fund support in the first place."
Speaker after speaker at plenary sessions of the two institutions on Sunday as well as at meetings of smaller policymaking bodies on Saturday said the world economy was humming along at its briskest pace in 30 years, with momentum expected to hit five percent this year.
But the horizon is clouded by rising oil prices, prompting an appeal here to oil producers to ensure that supplies are sufficient to keep prices manageable, along with huge deficits in the United States and tepid growth in a eurozone resistant to reform.
The G7 had been hoping that by inviting China for informal discussions Beijing might be induced to allow its currency, at present pegged to the dollar, to float freely.
IMF and World Bank delegates likewise called for currency flexibility, seen as a needed measure in response to what is considered an artificially weak yuan that gives China an unfair export advantage.
In the end China held its ground and gave no hint that it might speed up moves toward flexibility.
"We have already said, time and again, that we are moving towards more market-based, supply-and-demand-based, exchange rates," said Li Ruogu, deputy head of the Chinese central bank.
British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, whose government has pledged to pay the 10 percent owed to the World Bank by poor countries, reminded delegates that the ambitious 15-year anti-poverty targets adopted by the world community in 2000 are in dire jeopardy.
The Group of Seven did acknowledge that debt sustainability for poor countries could wait no longer and pledged to produce a progress report on the question by the end of the year.
The G7 also vowed to reduce Iraq's 120-billion-dollar debt by January but remained at odds over the scope of the cut, with France advocating a 50 percent reduction now against calls for a 95 percent reduction by the United States and Britain.
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