Jaitley for urgent World Bank, IMF quota reforms

Washington, April 23 (IANS) The World Bank needs to decide the issues of Selective Capital Increase (SCI) to reflect the increasing weight of Developing and Transition Countries (DTCs) and General Capital Increase (GCI) to expand its annual lending, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has said.

"We must fulfill our commitment to consider and reach a decision on SCI and GCI by annual meetings 2017 in line with the Lima Roadmap," he said at the plenary here on Saturday of the Development Committee of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

"We support SCI to bring about voice reform to ensure higher representation to the under-represented and support the use of the dynamic formula based allocation," he said.

The Finance Minister also urged a decision this year on expanding the annual lending by the various arms of the multilateral lender through the GCI formula.

"A minimum 50 per cent increase in historical average of $24 billion per annum in the case of the IBRD (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and a 100 per cent increase in case of IFC (International Finance Corp) would be quite necessary to make the World Bank deliver a commitment level of $100 billion a year to make it play a meaningful and leadership role in global development landscape," Jaitley said.

Addressing the plenary of the International Monetary and Finance Committee (IMFC) earlier on Saturday, Jaitley said current IMF quotas do not reflect global economic realities.

"Recent work by the Fund also points to the need for realigning quota shares to reflect the changed economic realities. All these must be achieved as part of the 15th General Review of Quotas (GRQ)," he said.

"We are disappointed that the deadline for completing the 15th GRQ has been pushed back to no later than the 2019 annual meetings. Any further delay in the 15th GRQ will erode Fund's legitimacy and credibility and will be against the spirit of the Articles of Agreement," he added.