Soviet Crisis Tests World’s Financial Elite

The dapper, bearded man wandered almost unnoticed through the convention-center lobby at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

For Angel Gurria, Mexico’s chief debt negotiator, it was a 180-degree turn from meetings like this during the 1980s, when he was mobbed by reporters seeking his comment on the Third World debt crisis, the hot topic of the decade.

But at last week’s meeting, Latin Americans such as Gurria might as well have been invisible. The Soviet Union’s economic crisis overshadowed all else, and the limelight shone almost exclusively on Grigory Yavlinsky, the passionate, radical economist heading the Soviet delegation.

Gurria’s anonymity and Yavlinsky’s celebrity symbolize the immense changes under way as the world’s financial elite turns to the task of rescuing the Soviet economy.

The IMF and the World Bank, two powerful institutions that are still struggling to foster stability and development in the world’s relatively poor nations, are girding for a massive new job--guiding the transformation of the Soviet communist system. The excitement here over taking on that dual challenge was evident, but so was the worry.

To many Washingtonians, the IMF and World Bank, housed a few blocks from the White House, often appear to be mysterious international bureaucracies that seem to do little more than stage meetings that draw thousands of foreign diplomats, bankers, journalists and limousines to town.

But in other, less-developed parts of the world, they play enormous roles: The World Bank is the main face of global development aid, and the IMF helps countries that are undergoing financial crises, in part by enforcing tough austerity policies.

Now the fund and the bank are being asked to continue performing those roles while also taking the lead in assisting Moscow and the Soviet republics in restructuring their collapsing industrial base and creating prosperous market economies.

There were expressions of both skepticism and confidence last week on the ability of the institutions to handle their old and new responsibilities. But on one point, there was virtual unanimity: No real alternative exists.

Put simply, no other institutions, or countries, possess the combination of money and expertise that the IMF and World Bank have. “Who else can it be but us?” asked an IMF staffer rhetorically.

For the fund and the bank, the Soviet challenge marks a return to their original mandate.

Founded at a 1944 conference in Bretton Woods, N.H., they were designed to rebuild and stabilize a world shattered by war, and their founders envisioned them as “universal” institutions, open to all countries--including, they thought, the Soviet Union, which was one of the original proponents.

First, a row over loans between the United States and Soviets, and then the Cold War, kept Moscow and other Communist Bloc nations out of the fund and bank.

In the meantime, the Bretton Woods twins, having helped to restore the economies of western Europe, funneled more and more of their resources into the development and growth of Latin America, Africa and Asia, and later into an international war on poverty.

Now, even though the goal of alleviating poverty remains far from achieved, the IMF and World Bank are turning at last to the huge swaths of Europe and Asia that are abandoning the communist model.

The sense of history is not lost on Michel Camdessus, the Frenchman who heads the IMF. “For the Bretton Woods institutions,” Camdessus said in a speech, “a long-awaited opportunity for them to become truly universal . . . is drawing close.”

Now the question is whether the institutions will become truly universal, or just stretched thin. Many at last week’s conference, especially those from the Third World, voiced fears that the IMF and the bank will draw funds and staff away from traditional recipients to the politically sexier Soviet and East European states.

“If you take from John and give to Thomas,” said Raphael Mlolwa, a Tanzanian planning official, “there is less for John, isn’t there?”

Others question whether the methods the fund and the bank have applied in the developing world will work in the Soviet economy, given the long history of central planning by a heavy-handed bureaucracy.

“There are no time-tested blueprints for charting the course from a state-dominated command system to a successful market economy,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady said in a speech here.

To succeed, he warned, the IMF and the World Bank “must change their attitudes,” and they “need to develop new modes of operation” by sending much larger teams of experts than usual to train government officials and entrepreneurs in the basics of capitalism.