The landscape of the international monetary system is beginning to change, with the traditional industrial powers losing influence, said a report of the World Economic Forum and the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee (RBWC) released on Wednesday.

 

"A new geography of international finance is beginning to emerge," said RBWC Executive Director Marc Uzan.

 

"The big questions that policy makers are grappling with today -- from the persistence of large global imbalances, to the huge accumulation of reserves in surplus countries, to the day-to-day functioning of the IMF -- can no longer be viewed through the traditional prism of the G7 vis-à-vis the rest of the world," he said.

 

The report was based on a two-year review of the international monetary system in cooperation with Group of 20 governments.

 

It predicts increasingly large cross-border private capital flows, wider geographic distribution of economic activity and deepened regional macroeconomic and international trade policy coordination.

 

World Economic Forum Managing Director Richard Samans said that "An important transformation of the international monetary system appears to have begun in which the Group of 20, by virtue of its relatively informal and representative nature, may well prove to be the crucible in which its primary features are forged."

 

"In ways implicit and explicit, the G7 has begun to accept that its influence will have to be shared, as evidenced by the medium-term strategic review initiated by the IMF's managing director, which has set in motion negotiations likely to yield significant additional shifts in the institution's distribution of quotas and votes within the next two years," he added.

 

(Xinhua News Agency January 25, 2007)