When it comes to decision-making, little is known about the debates that actually go on in meetings of the key decisionmaking bodies. I will leave discussion of the situation at the Asian Development Bank to my colleague Shalmali Guttal. I would like to say a few words on the IMF and the World Bank.

In the case of the IMF, a formal vote, either in the Board of Directors or Board of Governors, is a relatively rare occurrence. It took a congressional hearing to force the US Executive Director during the Clinton administration to reveal that the executive board actually had votes on approximately a dozen out of 2000 decisions during her tenure. Instead of votes being counted, differences are rendered invisible by a process of consensus pushed by the biggest quota holders.

As Ngaire Woods has noted, consensus, as practised by the Fund, has non-democratic implications. One, it only serves to cover up the unequal power relations that would reveal themselves were a formal vote taken. Another is that governments and NGO's not present during the proceedings find it hard to figure out what actually transpired, thus undermining transparency and accountability.

With respect to the World Bank, what can I say except that the one time a World Bank official tried to exercise maximum transparency and elicit maximum public engagement in drafting the World Bank's key document, the World Development Report, he was forced to resign. I am referring to the case of Dr. Ravi Kanbur. When the chief economist of the World Bank, Joseph Stiglitz, challenged the paradigm of a sister institution, the IMF, he was eased out by his boss, James Wolfensohn, at the prodding of then Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers.

Maximum non-transparency was the policy of the World Bank, when it came to its relations with the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia, to which it funneled over $30 billion in 30 years. According to several reports, including a World Bank internal report that came out in 1999, the Bank tolerated corruption, accorded factual status to false government statistics, legitimized the dictatorship by passing if off as a model for other countries, and was complacent about the state of human rights and the monopolistic control of the economy. This close embrace of the Suharto regime continued well into the Wolfensohn era, and was something that the World Bank president has never apologized for.

As for the Bank's information disclosure policy, I think it is fair to say that, like the IMF and the ADB, it only discloses what does not hurt it. In its website, you only really find sanitized documents, not the confidential reports, drafts, aide-memoires, inter-office memoranda. and internal reports that would really illustrate how the Bank does business. I and my colleagues would never have been able to write Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines from the kind of documents that the Bank makes public. 85 per cent of the documents we used to write that book were confidential documents, and to get them, we had to break into the Bank and steal them.

All of this is by way of introduction. What I would like to focus on, however, is the practice of the non-transparent institution par excellence, the World Trade Organization.

Dr. Walden Bello is a professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines (Diliman) and is the executive director of Focus on the Global South, a program of the Chulalongkorn University Social Research Institute (Bangkok).

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