RBI governor to attend IMF conference in April

Reserve Bank of India governor Duvvuri Subbarao will share his perspective at an International Monetary Fund conference next month in Washington.

Discussing policy pursued by various governments in the aftermath of global financial crisis will be central to the conference.

The conference will bring together leading academics and policymakers from around the globe, as well as representatives from civil society, the private sector, and the media, according to the IMF.

The conference on 'Rethinking Macro Policy II: First Steps and Early Lessons', will take place at the IMF's Headquarters in Washington, DC on April 16-17.

The RBI governor will chair a session on capital account management on April 17, which would focus on controls, reserves, international provision of liquidity.

Prior to his appointment as RBI's governor in 2008, Mr Subbarao served as Finance Secretary to the government of India, and as Secretary to the Prime Minister's Economic Advisory Council.

The event will be hosted by Olivier Blanchard (MIT), David Romer (University of California, Berkeley), Joseph Stiglitz (Columbia University), among others. Mr Blanchard is also economic counsellor and director of research at the IMF.

The conference comes against the backdrop of global economic slowdown and divergent monetary policies adopted by the developed and developing nations.

"They (policy makers) have also realised that they have potentially many more instruments at their disposal, from macro prudential tools to unconventional monetary policy. But how to map instruments to targets remains very much a work in progress," Mr Blanchard said.

The three-day annual spring meeting of the IMF and the World Bank is scheduled to be held in Washington from April 19 onwards. Finance Minister P Chidambaram and other senior Indian officials are expected to attend the event.