ABSTRACT
Economic growth has de facto become a prime Fund objective, on a par with balance-of-payments equilibrium, even though, at Bretton Woods, growth was deliberately kept out of the Fund's purview, in order not to confuse the tasks of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. In its meeting on April 28, 1997, the Interim Committee of the IMF “agreed that the Fund's Articles should be amended to make the promotion of capital account liberalization a specific purpose of the Fund and to give the Fund appropriate jurisdiction over capital movements.” The provisions on foreign participation in domestic corporations in the recent standby arrangement with South Korea provide a striking example of the extent to which capital liberalization has entered into the Fund's conditionality. The Fund's Articles of Agreement are, of course, outdated in many other respects.
