General Assembly President unveils details of panel probing global financial system

General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto today announced the full composition of a high-level task force he is setting up to examine possible reform of the global financial system, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, in the wake of the current economic turmoil.

Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001 and is a former chief economist at the World Bank, will chair the Commission of Experts on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, which will suggest steps that Member States can take to secure a more stable global economic order.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram, the current Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), and José Antonio Ocampo of Colombia, who is a former Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, were also named to the panel.

The Commission’s other members include: Zeti Akhtar Aziz, the Governor and Chairman of Malaysia’s Central Bank; Jean-Paul Fitoussi, Professor of Economics at the Institute d’Etudes Politiques de Paris in France; Avinash Persaud of Barbados, who is Chairman of Intelligence Capital Limited; and Yaga Venugopal Reddy, former governor of India’s Reserve Bank.

Also on the panel are: Japan’s Eisuke Sakakibara, who is currently Professor at Waseda University in Tokyo; Chukwuma Soludo, the Governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank; and China’s Yu Yongding, the Director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics.

When Mr D’Escoto announced the formation of the panel last month, he noted that “there is growing recognition that the current turmoil in the financial system cannot be solved through piecemeal responses at the national and regional levels but requires a coordinated effort at the global level.”