• The Global Transparency Resource
• Importance of Transparency
• IFI's Introduced
  • AfDB - African Development Bank
  • ADB - Asian Development Bank
  • BIS - Bank for International Settlements
  • BSTDB - Black Sea Trade and Development Bank
  • CDB - Caribbean Development Bank
  • CEB - Council of Europe Development Bank
  • EBRD - European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
  • ECB - European Central Bank
  • EIB - European Investment Bank
  • IADB - Inter-American Development Bank
  • IFC - International Finance Corporation
  • IMF - International Monetary Fund
  • IsDB - Islamic Development Bank
  • OECD - Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
  • WB - World Bank
  • WTO - World Trade Organisation

What Are We? What Do We Do?

There are a lot of international financial institutions that are supposed to be helping countries to develop and to reduce poverty. There is a feeling that many of them aren't doing as good a job as they should be. Part of the reason for this is that there is not accountability on the part of the banks for the success or failure of their projects. A lot of people believe that the reason for that is that there is not enough transparency in the way that they operate.

The goal of the global transparency resource is to make the world's international financial institutions more transparent. The reason that they want to do this is that they believe that the public should have a greater say in the way that these institutions operate. For the most part these institutions don't really share information on what they do with the public. The reason for this is that they are strictly speaking private banks. However they do have a large influence on world affairs and there is a belief that the public should have a say in the way that they operate.

The biggest reason that there is a belief that the public should be involved in policy decisions is that there are a lot of people who think that those decisions are not really being made in the best interest of the countries that they are trying to help. Rather decisions are based on what is best for the bank and the countries that pay the bills for the banks. This is something that a lot of people would like to see changed because they believe that it would make the international financial institutions more effective at their stated goal of reducing poverty.

Of course in order to have a bigger say in what these institutions are doing the public needs to know what they are doing. In particular they need to know how the decisions are made. In general information is available on which projects will be funded but there is little available on things like how that decision was made, what projects were rejected and what kind of conditions the receiving government is being required to meet. Without knowing stuff like this there is little that the public can do to influence the decision making process.

The main way that it is hoped to increase transparency is through the creation of the Global Transparency resource which is designed to audit the transparency of ten of the largest international financial institutions and rank them on how well they do. The hope is that by ranking them it will encourage the ones that rank lowly to take steps to improve. This should in turn put pressure on the institutions at the top to take steps to remain there. This has proven an effective strategy in the past so there is hope that it will work here as well.