Annual Meetings of The International Monetary Fund and The World Bank Group

The IMF and World Bank meet each autumn in what is officially known as the Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group and each spring in the Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group. Names of the two groups are alternated each year so a different one has top billing.

The autumn meetings are customarily held in Washington, D.C., United States for two consecutive years, and in another member country in the third year. On the weekend of the autumn meetings the G7 also meets. The 2006 Annual Meetings and their supporting events were held from 11–20 September 2006 at the Suntec Singapore International Convention and Exhibition Centre in Singapore.

Since the mid-1990s, these meetings have centerpoints for anti-globalization movement protests. There have been complete bans on outdoor protests in the 2003 meetings in Dubai, United Arab Emirates as well as the 2006 meeting in Singapore, where only indoor demonstrations within a designated area is permitted. Some argue that such bans are out of safety concerns, while others consider them an effort to curb dissent. These measures has led to retaliatory actions by NGOs who targeted the organisers, as well as the IMF and World Bank for allegedly picking venues which are known to impose such restrictions.

Read more about Annual Meetings Of The International Monetary Fund And The World Bank Group:  List of Annual Meetings

Famous quotes containing the words annual, meetings, monetary, fund, world, bank and/or group:

    No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery,—flags of all her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can read,—while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    I have been reporting club meetings for four years and I am tired of hearing reviews of the books I was brought up on. I am tired of amateur performances at occasions announced to be for purposes either of enjoyment or improvement. I am tired of suffering under the pretense of acquiring culture. I am tired of hearing the word “culture” used so wantonly. I am tired of essays that let no guilty author escape quotation.
    Josephine Woodward, U.S. author. As quoted in Everyone Was Brave, ch. 3, by William L. O’Neill (1969)

    There is no legislation—I care not what it is—tariff, railroads, corporations, or of a general political character, that all equals in importance the putting of our banking and currency system on the sound basis proposed in the National Monetary Commission plan.
    William Howard Taft (1857–1930)

    I am advised that there is an unexpended balance of about $45,000 of the fund appropriated for the relief of the sufferers by flood upon the Mississippi River and its tributaries, and I recommend that authority be given to use this fund to meet the most urgent necessities of the poorer people in Oklahoma.
    Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901)

    I started off rapping for people just like myself, people who were in awe of wealth and flash. It was a conversation between me and them. But now most of those who buy my records are listening in on others’ conversation. They are the aural equivalent of voyeurs, thrilled at this crazy world that has nothing to do with their experience.
    Ice-T [Tracy Marrow], U.S. rap musician. Observer (London, Oct. 27, 1991)

    The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.
    Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)

    There is nothing in the world that I loathe more than group activity, that communal bath where the hairy and slippery mix in a multiplication of mediocrity.
    Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)