IMF staff buyout draws more interest than expected
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Around 600 International Monetary Fund employees have requested buyouts under a plan aimed at cutting 380 jobs, officials said on Monday.
IMF staff and board members said the number was at least 585, with some saying it is as high as 620, about a quarter of the fund's 2,400 full-time staff.
The job cuts are part of broader plans to modernize the Washington-based institution and attract new staff to expand its oversight of global financial and capital markets, while also downsizing and cutting costs.
IMF spokesman Masood Ahmed confirmed that the number of employees that have requested buyouts was "somewhat in excess" of the 380 jobs that needed to be cut.
Ahmed said the result of the buyout offer would be made on Tuesday.
He said the large response to the buyout meant that no-one would be forced out of their job involuntarily. However, it was unclear if the IMF would extend the buyout beyond the 380 jobs it intends to trim.
"Even with this number of volunteers, which are somewhat in excess of the 380 we had identified, the challenge is to focus the fund in terms of doing the kinds of things the membership finds most useful for their needs going forward," he told Reuters.
Domenico Lombardi, president of the Oxford Institute for Economic Policy and a former IMF board member, said IMF staff morale has run low for several years as the fund has undergone internal changes amid a shifting global economic environment.
"The (buyouts) reflect low staff morale that has been going on for quite some time, and the perception in the eyes of many economists that the IMF has lost relevance among member countries," Lombardi said.
"Certainly, the most relevant factor is that the IMF is seen as less central, less important, and therefore people have less incentive to stay."
He also cited the weakening U.S. dollar, which undercut the competitiveness of IMF salaries and benefits for European staffers.
"In the United States, the IMF has also lost clout vis-a-vis with competing employers such as academic institutions, which nowadays offer very good and very competitive salaries," said Lombardi, who also is a senior scholar at the Brookings Institution.
Lombardi said it was critical for IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn to show strong leadership to rebuild the institution as a desired location for international economists.
"Certainly the IMF should find new ways to become more attractive also as an employer, not only as lender, not only as a provider of policy advice," Lombardi said.
Ted Truman, a former U.S. Treasury official during the Clinton administration and now a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said the fund needed to trim a bloated workforce. Continued...
