Press Release No. 10/343

Press Release: IMF Says Stronger Growth Key to Achieving Millennium Development Goals

September 16, 2010

IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn today warned that the global crisis had derailed progress toward the Millennium Development Goals and called on the international community to do more to help achieve the MDGs, including through faster growth.

“Everything hinges on restoring balanced and sustainable global growth. This is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Growth is not enough, but certainly, without it all other efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals will be frustrated,” Mr. Strauss-Kahn said. The Managing Director will address the United Nations Summit in New York on September 20.

An IMF staff paper released ahead of next week’s U.N.  Summit, Reaching the MDGs: Macroeconomic Prospects and Challenges in Low-Income Countries, lays out specific actions needed to sustain progress towards the MDGs:

• Advanced and dynamic emerging market economies should focus on securing the global recovery, which remains fragile and sluggish.

• Donors should keep their Gleneagles promises on aid, open up trade—moving quickly to dismantle the walls that block exports from poorer countries—and intensify their support for fragile states.

Developing countries should focus on restoring strong growth—by investing in infrastructure and creating a more supportive business environment—and on making their economies more resilient to shocks, by reinforcing the strong macroeconomic policies that served them so well in the recent crisis and putting in place more effective social safety nets.

For its part, the IMF will continue to make available its interest free loans to countries facing shocks, help member countries develop strategies to scale up investment, and provide technical assistance and support for capacity-building, so that countries can manage their resources more effectively in pursuit of growth and poverty reduction goals.

The crisis has had a devastating human cost in poor countries. According to World Bank estimates, as a result of the crisis 71 million fewer people will have escaped from poverty, an additional 1.2 million children might die before the age of five, and 100 million more people might lack access to safe water.