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Oxfam's response to today’s announcement that Christine Lagarde is stepping down as Managing Director (MD) of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), effective on September 12, 2019.

An internal investigation has revealed that the World Bank has invested in a palm oil and food company implicated in serious rights abuses in Honduras.

'In terms of a plan to reduce extreme income inequality, we are left empty handed. There has been a lot of talk and a raw sketch of plan of action in the communique, but it’s just a drop in the bucket.”

Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director, and Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, spoke Tuesday about their institutions’ priorities ahead of next week’s spring meetings in Washington. 

Oxfam applauds the World Bank's new strategy to halve extreme poverty by 2020 and end it by 2030, but swift action is now needed to bring the strategy to life.

As the Annual Meetings of the World Bank kick off in Washington this week, Oxfam welcomed the focus on inequality, but urges top officials at the institution to align their words with their actions if they are serious about combating inequality and poverty. 

“At the start of the week, we urged the Bank to show it’s serious about ‘“ending poverty and boosting shared prosperity”’ in discussions on additional funding. We’re pleased to see them recommit to this, but it’s now up to the Bank’s programming to put its money where its mouth is," said Nadia Daar, head of Oxfam International's Washington office. 

The International Monetary Fund’s advice to countries promotes policies that fail to reduce inequality and may even increase it, according to Oxfam research. This advice clashes with what their own research shows countries should do to reduce inequality.

In “Powering the Transition,” Oxfam details how together, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank are investing almost $5 billion in fossil fuels in the 10 Asian countries that belong to the Climate Vulnerable Forum.

84 percent of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) COVID-19 loans encourage, and in some cases require, poor countries hard hit by the economic fallout from the pandemic to adopt more tough austerity measures in the aftermath of the health crisis, warned Oxfam today.