The IMF and the World Bank were established in 1944, when 700 delegates travelled to Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, USA, with the goal of establishing an institution to guarantee world financial stability in the aftermath of the second World War.
US president F.D. Roosevelt defined the task ahead as "the creation of a dynamic world economy in which the peoples of every nation will be able to realise their potential in peace and enjoy, increasingly, the fruits of material progress on an earth infinitely blessed with natural riches".
Fifty years later, the gap between rich and poor has increased dramatically, as the world's richest 358 individuals have an accumulated fortune greater than the total annual wages of 45 per cent of the world's poorest inhabitants.
Impoverished nations are locked in a cycle of debt repayment, dependency on fresh loans and increasing poverty, obliging them to seek permanent help from the IMF/WB.
In return, developing economies adopt structural adjustment policies which follow specific guidelines; the privatisation of state industries, the opening of domestic industry to international competition, the flexibilisation of the labour market and the dismantling of social welfare provisions.
IMF and WB directors have acknowledged shortcomings in their programme for Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC), a group of 41 poor nations eligible for debt write-offs.
The IMF/WB has been accused of promoting US and EU global interests, as votes are distributed according to cash provided to the two institutions. The group of seven industrialised countries (G7) control almost half the votes on the IMF board, while the bank's main clients, the world's poorest nations, controls fewer than 2 per cent of votes.
The IMF broke with tradition last week and revealed the salary of top executives, including its managing director Horst Kohler. His annual salary plus expenses totals $350,000, equivalent to the annual wage of 600 Bolivian workers.
Jubilee 2000 director, Ann Pettifor, describes the IMF/WB as "the last great communist banks" - unelected and unaccountable, their errors sheltered by taxpayer revenues. Last week, a fresh scandal broke when Prof Ravi Khanbur, the author of a World Bank report on global poverty, published this week, resigned after discovering that his analysis of the downside of market reforms was omitted from the final report.