IMF director rejects critics of its policy as being offensive

A senior IMF official has condemned critics of the organisation's record on social issues.

Mr Stanley Fischer, first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said the unfounded, patently untrue criticism was "arrant nonsense" and "an outrage and an offence".

Mr Fischer said he was fed up with hearing "arrant nonsense" from people who said IMF programmes did not include measures to deal with the social consequences of its programmes.

"It is an outrage and an offence to be told things which are patently not true," Mr Fischer told the World Economic Forum annual gathering.

He said he was speaking out so strongly because he had heard this criticism "repeatedly" at the WEF meeting from "people who should know better". "It is time that it stopped. Pay attention to what is actually happening and don't pay attention to your casual impressions," he said. "Look at each programme and see," an obviously angry Mr Fischer said. It was an "illusion" to think that the makers of the problems "have no social conscience or do not care".

Mr Fischer also warned against exaggerating the likely social consequences of economic restructuring programmes, recalling that at the beginning of the Indonesian programme there were forecasts that the poverty rate would rise from 11 per cent to 40 per cent, but the latest World Bank figures show that it has risen to just 14 per cent.