The US Should Leave the International Monetary Fund

For this round, I will outline my case and then use the remaining rounds to ask/answer questions and summarize/clarify arguments. My argument is built on 5 main contentions: 1. The IMF is putting forward and supporting a flawed model for development. "The IMF forces countries from the Global South to prioritize export production over the development of diversified domestic economies (Global Exchange)." What this policy does is move the agricultural business from providing for the destitute and hungry citizens of its own country to supplying food for wealthier nations. This creates a food disparity and this change also perpetuates poverty, instead of ending. 2. Loaning money to governments who do not have fully free economies, which is a practice the IMF uses, promotes corruption and greed instead of growth. What the IMF is doing with this practice is rewarding countries who do not actually have free markets or economies. By doing so, you are not promoting these government to work towards a better economy, you are simply teaching them to rely on these handouts. As the Heritage Foundation points out: "In sum, after receiving IMF funds for an average of 42 years (except Russia, which first received funds in 1992), the economies of most of the IMF recipients are today "mostly unfree" according to the Index--except Mexico and Argentina, which are only marginally better. As a result, the recipient countries' per capita income went from between $259 and $5,419 in the 1960s to between $494 and $6,579 in 2002. South Korea is the only country that grew and developed to a significant degree, today enjoying a per capita income of $14,280; but the reasons for that development are an extensive opening of the economy and the preservation of a strong rule of law--a very different story from other IMF recipients." And what we can see from these stats is that governments will be corrupt no matter what the IMF tries to supply them with, therefore the current system of the IMF is useless, and a waste of American money. 3. IMF quota system ensures only major economies get a voice, and that you must buy your votes. The current quota system, as shown by the IMF site, is based on the money you can put into the IMF organization. This leaves the United States and Europe with the lump sum of votes (Global Exchange). While this does give the United States more say, it is not a just system and undermines the intent of the International Monetary Fund. And since this is the system the IMF uses and has used, the United States must not stand for this corruption and domination. 4. IMF, and its partner the World Bank, hurt the environment In a Yale study done on the effects of the IMF in correlation to deforestation show that there is a link between the two. In addition, the report describes that the date given by these two organizations is very suspicious. The reasoning is as follows: "Out of our total sample of 2,258 country-year observations, there are 1,647 observations that are coded zero. For some of these countries, where there is very little forest area, this is reasonable, for other countries it is highly suspicious. Note that the zeroes are distinct from the World Bank convention of coding missing data as ".." We suspect, however, that some of the zeroes should have in fact been coded as missing values. Thus, we re-ran the entire analysis above using only the observations for which a non-zero value for deforestation was recorded. The qualitative results were the same. Indeed, they were strengthened (Vreeland, Sturn & Durbin 24)." So this shows a possible attempt to lessen the apparent correlation between the environment and the IMF. Either way, the conclusion that the IMF is detrimental is supported. 5. Reform won't work Many people propose simple reforms instead of complete abolition, but there are too many problems as shown with the IMF. It is a dead and counter-productive system that needs to be scrapped and not supported by the United States of America. So based on these reasons, the United States must no longer monetarily support the IMF or openly participate in it. I urge all voters to vote a pro ballot. Source List (I apologize for not MLA citing them, but I am on my phone for the time being): http://www.globalexchange.org... http://www.heritage.org... http://www.imf.org... http://www.yale.edu...