Abstract

1. Introduction

When people talk of the international financial institutions (IFIs), they usually mean the two Bretton Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Of course, strictly speaking, any multilateral organization with financial operations is an IFI – for example, the regional multilateral banks, regional monetary authorities or some agencies of the UN that disburse funding. However, in practice, the term IFIs is understood to mean the two global IFIs – the Fund and the Bank. In recent years there has been growing discussion of the role of these institutions in the provision of international public goods (IPGs). An aid-fatigued public in the rich North, beset by its own internal budgetary problems (for example, the looming social security crisis associated with an aging population) and convinced by tales of waste and corruption in aid flows, has grown weary and wary of conventional country-specific development assistance. In contrast, the notion of IPGs seems attractive to Northern publics – at least, their representatives have adopted the IPG refrain in international fora.

But what exactly is an IPG? Given the ‘aura’ that the term seems to have developed, there is clearly an incentive to justify any activity by any agency as an IPG, and aid agencies have not been shy in doing this. At its most general level, development in poor countries is being defined as an IPG, and hence an argument for continuing conventional aid – disenchantment with which turned the Northern public to IPGs in the first place.