Financial reforms

More policy coordination is needed to address the post-crisis challenges, and the support for such cooperation demonstrated during the spring meetings help lay the groundwork for a better world financial system.

"I think that I'm more confident than I was a few months ago, a few weeks ago," said IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, "Clearly, different countries want to go on working together and that is probably for the global economy the best news that we could expect."

The IMFC said in a communique that problems in the financial sector were at the heart of the recent global crisis, while strengthening financial regulation, supervision, and resilience remains an incomplete task.

The crisis has demonstrated the urgent need to introduce international regulatory oversight of a globalized financial system, which would create less volatile financial flows for innovation, risk taking and investing in employment, manufacturing and development.

To tackle the issue, the IMF members agreed to redouble efforts to forge a collaborative and consistent approach for a stable global financial system that can support the economic recovery.

Kahn warned that advanced economies, trying to plug loopholes in financial regulation, risk creating inconsistent regulatory regimes that result in fresh problems of coordination.

"The rules of the game have to be almost the same or they have to be consistent," he said.

A noticeably constructive outcome of the spring meetings is that, for the first time, the IMFC and the G20 have initiated joint sessions, named Mutual Assessment Process, to strengthen the collaboration between the two groups.