US to advance proposals in Delhi to increase World Bank and IMF lending capabilities, White House said (file)
US President Joe Biden will push for reforms of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank that better serve the needs of developing countries at the G20 summit in Delhi next month, the White House said on Tuesday.
Jake Sullivan, White House national security adviser, said the two needed to offer a better alternative for development assistance and financing to what he called China's “forced and unsustainable lending” through Beijing's “Belt and Road” initiative.
“We've heard loud and clear that countries are asking us to step up our support in the face of the overlapping challenges they face,” Sullivan told reporters.
At the G20 summit, Biden will “focus much of his energy on modernizing the multilateral development banks, including the World Bank and the IMF,” he said.
The goal is to ensure that development banks offer “high-standard, high-leverage solutions” to the challenges facing developing countries, he said.
He called the two institutions “highly effective and transparent,” comparing this to Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative, a decades-old program to expand China's role in global development that included large infrastructure and industrial loans to poorer countries.
“I propose that the World Bank and IMF present a positive, positive alternative to a much more opaque or coercive method” of development finance that China is offering, he said.
The US would advance proposals in Delhi that would increase World Bank and IMF lending capabilities by about $200 billion, he said.
However, Sullivan emphasized that China, as a member of the G20 and a key partner in the IMF and World Bank, plays a central role in the modernization of both institutions.
“So our support for the World Bank and IMF is not aimed at China,” he said.
Sullivan was speaking at a time when a Chinese-dominated forum of major emerging economies, the BRICS, was holding its own summit in South Africa.
The BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – represent a quarter of the world economy and interest in joining the club has risen sharply.
“We do not expect the BRICS to become some kind of geopolitical rival to the United States or anyone else. It's a very diverse collection of countries,” Sullivan said.
(Except for the headline, this article was not edited by NDTV staff and is published via a syndicated feed.)
