World Bank funding for these countries comes from the International Development Association. The Meltzer report for the US Congress has recommended that the IMF should get out of long-term adjustment lending and the PRGF should be closed down. Similarly, the UK Treasury Committee has recommended that the IMF should not be involved in debt reduction programmes. These frameworks apply to countries borrowing from the multilateral institutions. The common framework requires a certain amount of cooperation.
Differences exist both in terms of the policy analysis and the definition of terms.
Also, it appears that Bank staff have been concerned that the IMF is infringing on their territory and is trying to expand its remit. Whilst the IMF has publicly tried to allay these fears by insisting that it is not moving into social areas, questions have been asked as to why the World Bank's Vice President for poverty, Masood Ahmed, has joined the IMF's policy department as Deputy Director. It is clear that the Bank and Fund, whilst admitting that participation will mean longer processes for developing poverty strategies and that these will have longer time frames, expect the poverty framework to fit into established mechanisms and time-frames for agreeing programmes and providing finance. Some NGOs argue that policy and programme development should be seen as the continuous process that it is, with participation and evaluation an implicit, on going part of it. This implies building on and developing permanent mechanisms at the national level which the Bank and Fund should fit in to rather than requiring national processes to fit into Bank and Fund cycles.