The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is an organization of 188 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.
The Bretton Woods agreement
The IMF was conceived in July 1944, when representatives of 45 countries meeting in the town of Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the northeastern United States, agreed on a framework for international economic cooperation, to be established after the Second World War. They believed that such a framework was necessary to avoid a repetition of the disastrous economic policies that had contributed to the Great Depression.
The IMF came into formal existence in December 1945, when its first 29 member countries signed its Articles of Agreement. It began operations on March 1, 1947. Later that year, France became the first country to borrow from the IMF.
The IMF's membership began to expand in the late 1950s and during the 1960s as many African countries became independent and applied for membership. But the Cold War limited the Fund's membership, with most countries in the Soviet sphere of influence not joining.
Fast Facts on the IMF
- Membership: 188 countries
- Headquarters: Washington, D.C.
- Executive Board: 24 Directors representing countries or groups of countries
- Staff: Approximately 2,475 from 156 countries
- Total quotas: US$360 billion (as of 8/9/12)
- Additional pledged or committed resources: US$1 trillion
- Loans committed (as of 8/9/12): US$243 billion, of which US$186 billion have not been drawn (see table)
- Biggest borrowers (amount agreed as of 8/9/12): Greece, Portugal, Ireland
- Biggest precautionary loans (amount agreed as of 8/9/12): Mexico, Poland, Colombia
- Surveillance consultations: Consultations concluded for 128 countries in FY2011 and for 117 countries in FY2012
- Technical assistance: Field delivery in FY2011—198.2 person years
- Transparency: In 2011, about 90 percent of Article IV and program-related staff reports and policy papers were published
- Original aims: Article I of the Articles of Agreement sets out the IMF’s main goals:
- promoting international monetary cooperation;
- facilitating the expansion and balanced growth of international trade;
- promoting exchange stability;
- assisting in the establishment of a multilateral system of payments; and
- making resources available (with adequate safeguards) to members experiencing balance of payments difficulties
Rabindranath Tagore: A Commemorative Volume and Rabindranath Tagore: An Interpretation have been released to mark Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary. The first Asian Noble Laureate and the only Indian Noble Laureate for Literature, he composed the national anthems for both India and Bangladesh. He wrote poetry, novels, essays, plays and short stories and was a painter. In Bengali, his collected writings fill 31 volumes . Comparisons are often drawn between him and Irish nationalist and cultural revivalist W.B. Yeats, who introduced Tagore’s works in English to the West. Both resonate of the Romantics. Tagore’s mystical symbolism is compared with English poet-painter William Blake. Some of his paintings compare with Blake’s, although he was more than just a mystic.
The Valley of Flowers is a marvel of nature. Once the snow melts in the valley, from May onwards, various plant species start flowering. This flowering continues till September. The Valley covers an area of 87.5 sq km over an altitude varying from 3,200 to 6,600 m with its main area of about 10 sq km running in the east-west direction along the river Pushpawati. The trek to the Valley starts from Govindghat. The 13-km trek to Ghangaria moves along the river Bhyndar. The trek till Bhyndar, 10 km away, is rather comfortable. From Bhyndar it is a steep climb to Ghangaria. The landscape near the Bhyndar village is painted with mountains, waterfalls and forests. Pink and white roses greet us on this stretch.
Sighting the tiger in the Sunderbans is a thrilling experience. The excitement builds up in Kolkata from where the journey begins. The Sunderbans, situated along the southern tip of West Bengal, is 4,262 sq km of watery wilderness, of which 2,585 sq km are part of the tiger reserve. The area is a UNESCO world heritage site, being a unique example of an estuarine mangrove ecosystem.
Har Gobind Khorana, was born in 1922. He obtained his M.Sc. degree from Punjab University in Lahore. He worked with Professor Vladimir Prelog, who moulded Khorana’s thought and philosophy towards science, work and effort. After a brief stay in India in 1949, Khorana went back to England and worked with Professor G.W. Kenner and Professor A.R.Todd. It was at Cambridge, U.K. that he got interested in both proteins and nucleic acids. Dr Khorana shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology in 1968 with Marshall Nirenberg and Robert Holley for cracking the genetic code.
Victor Grignard had a strange start in academic life for a chemist - he took a maths degree. When he eventually switched to chemistry, it was not to the mathematical province of physical chemistry but to organic chemistry. While attempting to find an efficient catalyst for the process of methylation, he noted that Zn in diethyl ether had been used for this purpose and wondered whether the Mg/ether combination might be successful. Grignard reagents were first reported in 1900 and Grignard used this work for his doctoral thesis in 1901. In 1910, Grignard obtained a professorship at the University of Nancy and in 1912, he was awarded the Nobel prize for Chemistry which he shared with Paul Sabatier who had made advances in nickel catalysed hydrogenation.
Temples often have some pillars portraying human figures playing musical instruments, but seldom do these pillars themselves produce music. At the Nellaiappar temple in Tamil Nadu, gentle taps on a cluster of pillars carved out of a single piece of rock produce the basic notes of Indian classical music, viz. Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa, Dha, Ni, Sa. Vibrations of these pillars depend on elasticity of the stone used, its density and shape.
born in Vienna, Austria, worked on the kinetic theory of gases independently of Maxwell. A firm advocate of atomism, that is basic to kinetic theory, Boltzmann provided a statistical interpretation of the Second Law of thermodynamics and the concept of entropy. He is regarded as one of the founders of classical statistical mechanics. The proportionality constant connecting energy and temperature in kinetic theory is known as Boltzmann’s constant in his honour.
He made a brilliant guess that equal volumes of gases have equal number of molecules at the same temperature and pressure. This helped in understanding the combination of different gases in a very simple way. It is now called Avogadro’s hypothesis (or law). He also suggested that the smallest constituent of gases like hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen are not atoms but diatomic molecules.
He was an English chemist. When different types of atoms combine, they obey certain simple laws. Dalton’s atomic theory explains these laws in a simple way. He also gave a theory of colour blindness.
Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) (1824-1907), born in Belfast, Ireland, is among the foremost British scientists of the nineteenth century. Thomson played a key role in the development of the law of conservation of energy suggested by the work of James Joule (1818-1889), Julius Mayer (1814- 1878) and Hermann Helmholtz (1821-1894). He collaborated with Joule on the so-called Joule-Thomson effect : cooling of a gas when it expands into vacuum. He introduced the notion of the absolute zero of temperature and proposed the absolute temperature scale, now called the Kelvin scale in his honour. From the work of Sadi Carnot (1796-1832), Thomson arrived at a form of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Thomson was a versatile physicist, with notable contributions to electromagnetic theory and hydrodynamics.
Rudolf Clausius (1822-1888), born in Poland, is generally regarded as the discoverer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Based on the work of Carnot and Thomson, Clausius arrived at the important notion of entropy that led him to a fundamental version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics that states that the entropy of an isolated system can never decrease. Clausius also worked on the kinetic theory of gases and obtained the first reliable estimates of molecular size, speed, mean free path, etc.