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Featuring Ariel Buira, editor of Challenges to the World Bank and IMF: Developing Country Perspectives (Anthem Press, 2003), Carol Welch and Thomas Dawson.

Are industrial countries keeping the promise made in the Monterrey Consensus to increase the voice of developing countries in the Bretton Woods institutions? No, according to Ariel Buira and his co-authors in their new book of essays entitled Challenges to the World Bank and the IMF: Developing Country Perspectives. Buira and his co-authors also claim that the governance of the IMF does not meet the standards of transparency, accountability and legitimacy that it prescribes to its member countries.

Dani Rodrik says "nowhere is the voice of the developing nations expressed as cogently and powerfully as in these papers." The book is a publication of the Group of 24 (G-24) Research Program. The G-24, formed to ensure effective participation of developing countries in international financial institutions, consists of nine African, eight Latin American and seven Asian countries.

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Ariel Buira is Director of the G-24 Secretariat. He has served as Special Envoy of the President of Mexico to the UN Conference on Financing for Development, Member of the Board of Governors of the Bank of Mexico and Executive Director on the IMF's Board.

Carol Welch is Director of the International Program at Friends of the Earth. She has written extensively on the subject of IMF governance, in particular "The IMF and Good Governance," Foreign Policy in Focus, Vol. 3, no. 33, October 1998.

Thomas Dawson (moderator) is Director of the IMF's External Relations Department since 1999. Prior to joining the IMF in 1999, he was a Director in the Financial Institutions Group at Merrill-Lynch. He also served as the U.S. Executive Director on the IMF's Board from 1989 to 1993.