By John A. Akec

November 1, 2011 —This is the second part of a previous article in which I shared with readers my personal impressions about this year’s IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings (from 19 -26 September 2011). I attended the annual meetings with nine other IMF academic fellows for this year. As pointed out in the previous article, IMF fellowships were awarded to ten academics from South Sudan, Armenia, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Cameroon, Egypt, Mongolia, Paraguay, Romania, and Tanzania. Leaders of civil society organisations, journalists, and youth groups were invited, as has been the practice in the last decade, to attend the week-long annual events in Washington, DC, that involved taking part in thematic seminars, workshops, round-table discussions, televised debates, and conferences, all of which are concerned with discussing current global economic challenges. That said, this was the first time the Fund has invited academics through a fellowship. For the benefit of all, I am going to share my impressions about seminars, panel discussions, and conferences that are of particular relevance to the sort of economic challenges that are currently faced by South Sudan. Last but by no means least, the article will briefly comment on how academic community may contribute to enhancing IMF’s effectiveness.

This conference was probably one of the highlights of the annual meetings in terms of the importance attached to the economic challenges it tried to address and the solutions the participants have put forward in their presentations which could be of great value to policy and decision-makers in South Sudan, and similar economies that are heavily dependent on natural resources for export earnings. In a nutshell, a well studied and lived problem by many resource-rich countries is that government income from export (such as diamond, oil, copper, natural gas, etc) are hard to predict but fluctuates with global commodity prices that in turn depend on demand for a particular commodity at a time. This poses budgeting difficulties to governments of the affected countries. Another well studied economic problem prevalent in resource-rich countries is that these countries that are endowed with natural resources have tended to remind poor, fragile, and less democratic in comparisons with countries that are not endowed with natural resources, and had to innovate to build their economies from scratch. Besides, natural resource dependency is understood to lead to the so-called resource-curse, or Dutch disease.