On December 16 2008, APPP sponsored an open seminar on the "Global Financial Crisis and the Role of the IMF". The keynote speaker was Dr. Jack Boorman, who served as Head of the IMF's Policy Development and Review Department for many years, and the panelists were Prof. Eisuke Sakakibara of Waseda University (former Vice Minister of Finance for International Affairs), Mr. Akira Ariyoshi (Director of the IMF Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific), and APPP's Prof. Yasuhiro Maehara. The seminar was moderated by APPP's Prof. Masahiko Takeda. The audience, which numbered more than 100, included academics, current and former government officials, think tank economists, the press, and APPP and other students.

How to reform international financial institutions─and the IMF in particular─is a salient topic in the context of coping with the ongoing global financial crisis and preventing its recurrence. Dr. Boorman presented an ambitious list of steps to strengthen the IMF, such as an SDR allocation, a substantial quota increase, governance reform, and giving the IMF a new mandate on capital account transactions. While no fundamental disagreement was voiced by the panelists, they expressed caution on some of the steps proposed by Dr. Boorman. During the Q&A session that followed, the audience raised questions about the IMF's role during the Asian Crisis, the seeming asymmetry of the IMF's advice between developed and developing countries, and possible alternatives to the IMF such as the Chiang Mai Initiative.

The moderator concluded the seminar by noting that the debate on the IMF reform would no doubt continue, including at the next G20 Summit in April 2009, and that we received a lot of food of thought from the discussion that would help form our own views on where the reform process should be heading for.