It also emerged that Sir John Gieve, the deputy governor in charge of financial stability, who came in for criticism for the central bank's poor response to the crisis at Northern Rock, will leave his job early, in 2009.
At every opportunity, the IMF, the World Bank and the poor countries themselves stress the need for the industrial economies to demonstrate their commitment to free trade by opening up markets and ending domestic subsidies, in particular to farmers.
The sting in the IMF tail appeared to be calls for the government and the bank to do more to protect the poor, get credit to business, invest more in infrastructure and, if growth continues to flatline, to consider a temporary cut in VAT in future.
Grameen Phone, a Grameen Bank offshoot founded to provide services for the poor, now sells to everyone and has become the largest provider of mobile-phone services in Bangladesh.
The World Bank has sometimes been criticised for imposing the values of rich countries on poor people.
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To the accompaniment of baroque recorder music piped through the building, Tetsuo Shimokawa, the chairman of Dogin, a local bank, blames poor communications with the rest of Japan for the island's woes.
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When the bank was founded, it really was the only source of capital for many poor countries.
Now the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank have accepted it as one of the poor countries eligible for forgiveness of some of its debts.
The poor performance of the economy has prompted calls for the Bank of England to take a more proactive role in encouraging economic growth.
Rather than take the hits, some of them sued their investment bank for selling them poor products or giving bad advice.
No country that gave more votes to a small, rich minority than the poor majority, as the IMF and World Bank do, would be considered for a moment to be democratic.
Other forms of capital are unlikely to expand to fill all of the gap, but they will expand to fill most of it especially if the rules are drawn up to discourage only those forms of bank finance that are particularly hazardous for poor-country borrowers.
Symptomatic of the poor prospects for adequate Russian compliance with this and other conditions, however, is Russian Central Bank Chairman Victor Geraschenko's statement over the week-end that the agreement between the Yeltsin government and the bank on limiting credit expansion is "meaningless" and "really a trap" for reformist Deputy Prime Minister Boris Fyodorov.
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