Since the expiration of Turkey's last stand-by arrangement last May, a debate has been raging over whether Turkey should seek a new stand-by arrangement or not. This debate has distorted the view of the IMF for many Turks, who question the positive role the IMF can play as a conditionality-based lender -- requiring that Turkey meet certain macro and microeconomic performance criteria and agreed-to letters of intent in order to receive loans. (The shoe thrown at IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn last Thursday by a leftist Turkish student journalist, who shouted “IMF, get out of Turkey!” manifested the widely held, ill-informed and misguided view that the IMF is an evil and destructive force.) I, too, have participated in this debate through several columns, arguing for either a new regular stand-by arrangement or a precautionary stand-by arrangement. My purpose now is not to continue that increasingly moot debate, given the Justice and Development Party's (AK Party) government's reluctance to seek IMF help, reinforced by Turkey's incipient recovery from its deep recession, but to emphasize the much broader role the recently transformed IMF, having commendably learned from its past mistakes, plays through its wide range of other activities besides nonconcessional and concessional lending.
Among these non-lending activities, the one that deserves immediate attention as the IMF's annual meeting starts in Istanbul this week is the release last week of the latest editions of its World Economic Outlook (WEO) and Global Financial Stability Report (GFSR). These semiannual reports are the IMF's flagship contributions to our empirical knowledge of the course of the world economy and the global financial system. Utilizing the IMF's exceptional intellectual resources and huge data collection capabilities, they offer incisive analyses of the real economy and the financial system based on state-of-the-art economic and financial models and econometric estimations. They also provide critical support to the IMF's global monitoring activities, which are expected to become even more important with the enhanced role in global economic governance assigned to the IMF by the G-20, as noted in last week's column.
The IMF also publishes a wide range of time-series data on such economic and financial topics as the direction of international trade, balance of payments and exchange rates that go into its staff reports and research papers, which are read and cited widely by researchers in the academic and business communities. Most of these data are also available to researchers outside the IMF. Moreover, since 1995 the IMF has refined data dissemination standards with the General Data Dissemination System, used by all IMF members, and the Special Data Dissemination Standard, used by those IMF members who access international capital markets, to provide guidelines to its members in disseminating their economic and financial data. Finally, the IMF provides valuable technical assistance and training to many of its low-income members.
