Georgetown political scientist and occasional “Monkey Cage contributor”:http://tmc.org/blog/2010/11/23/irelands_bailout/ “James Vreeland”:http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jrv24/ was one of five experts asked by “Foreign Policy Magazine”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/06/28/lagardes_to_do_list?page=0,2 to comment on what should be on new “IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde’s”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13951950 “To Do List”. While of course noting the challenges posed by “recent developments in Greece”:http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europe/06/29/greece.strike/index.html?hpt=hp_t2, Vreeland chose to focus on the _political_ challenges facing the IMF over a medium-term time frame in terms of governance. Vreeland points to a growing tension between a developing world clamoring for more influence in the management of the fund and developed countries who face domestic political constituencies that won’t continue to support the fund in view of diminishing influence over management. Vreeland concludes:
Eventually, we will reach an impasse where Western governments will not have the domestic political capital to assent to the changes demanded by the developing world. That development may be inevitable, but it does not mean that we give up on global cooperation. The power asymmetries that allowed the IMF to function in previous decades — in which the most powerful actors assumed responsibility for providing the public good — have diminished on the global level, but they still persist in regions. The IMF should therefore embrace an increasing role for regional financial institutions, recognizing that the political will to provide liquidity in future crises will come from the regional hegemons with the most at stake. For example, the United States led in Mexico’s “Tequila Crisis” in the early 1990s, while Japan led in the East Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, and Germany leads in the current eurozone crisis.
Read his “full comments here”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/06/28/lagardes_to_do_list?page=0,2.