What’s behind the IMF headquarters plan?

Yesterday, I chided several IMF critics for what I characterized as their hackneyed outrage at IMF plans to refurbish one of its Washington headquarters buildings. One of those critics, Peter Chowla of the Bretton Woods Project, wrote an informative response.

I wonder why you are so trusting of what the IMF media relations person says? In past experience press relations staff say what will make their organization look good. This is not a one-sided criticism of the IMF but a reflection that media relations and PR people have a job – which is to manage the appearance of their employers. This is true of IMF press relations staff, as much as UN ones or State department ones or Monsanto’s PR people.

We have yet to see the detail of the proposals from the IMF – so we should proceed with caution. I would however be very surprised if the "renewal" project was limited to only the heating, air conditioning and ventilation systems. Part of the problem is that we actually don’t get to see the proposals until after the IMF has already agreed them. Very little chance for democratic input into this system – and especially not from the people who fund the IMF’s budget, that is taxpayers in the IMF’s borrowing countries like Turkey, Greece, Colombia, Latvia, Mexico etc.

Chowla argues that the IMF doesn’t have a good recent track record of cost-effective physical expansion and points to the expensive construction of a second headquarters building a few years back. I can’t match Chowla’s understanding of the IMF physical plant or its financing. But I think our difference really is over whether the institution serves a valuable purpose and deserves a modicum of trust. It’s fairly clear that Chowla and many other critics view the IMF as a fundamentally exploitative institution. Given that baseline, everything the institution does, including what appears to be fairly routine physical upgrading, appears suspect. My own starting point is quite different: I see the IMF as an institution that provides a valuable public service and is staffed, for the most part, by serious professionals who are actually monitored fairly closely by key shareholders and by an executive board that includes some voice for all member countries.

If the planned refurbishment does end up including gold-plated fixtures and a helicopter landing pad for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, however, I will revise my view accordingly.