International Monetary Fund

Dear Delegates,

Welcome to Harvard National Model United Nations 2012 International Monetary Fund Committee! My name is Da-Bin Ryu, and I am really excited to be spending lots of time with all of you in a couple months at the conference.

Da-Bin Ryu

To speak a little about myself, I am a sophomore in Adams House, thinking of concentrating in economics or government. I am also striving for a secondary in applied math or statistics, as well as a citation in Chinese (I’ve recently become very ambitious with East Asian languages!).

To talk about my life before Harvard, I was born in South Korea and moved to a city called Santa Barbara in Southern California, just in time for 4^th grade. I had loved science back in High School and my interests never seemed to be in debate or Model UN, but that quickly changed after I joined the administrative group for Harvard Model United Nations (HMUN), a sister conference of HNMUN but targeted at high school students. After that, I joined HNMUN as an assistant director of the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) committee, was elected as the Secretary for the International Relations Council (IRC) organization and am finally here to be a director for the IMF committee!

I am super excited to meet all of you as well as delve into these important issues in February! Our two topics “European Debt Crisis” and “Developing Countries’ Debt and IMF Lending” are relevant and important to all countries at present. I hope to make much progress in our discussions with all of you. If you have any questions or concerns before our conference, please feel free to send me an email anytime! Good luck and see you soon!

Sincerely,

Da-Bin Ryu
Director, International Monetary Fund
Harvard National Model United Nations 2012

Topic Area A: Developing Countries’ Debt and IMF Lending

In the mid-twentieth century, two international phenomena were happening simultaneously: the attempt of developing countries to establish themselves as independent sovereign governments and the accumulation of “petro” dollars in developed nations. These rich nations lent out money to developing countries and because of many reasons such as high interest rates, embezzlement, and the falling value of the developing countries’ currencies, these debts have become more and more difficult to pay off. Although there have been many international actions to try to alleviate these countries’ situations, such as the formation of the Jubilee Debt Coalition and agreements among IMF and World Bank, it still remains as an international topic of issue. Because of the IMF’s involvement, our committee needs to study what led to this situation and how we can further work to resolve it.

Topic Area B: European Debt Crisis

The recent European debt crisis has hit the headlines in the news more than any other issue recently. The crisis started with Greece’s fiscal problems and subsequent default on its debt, which then spread to Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. When European countries became buried deep in their own sovereign debts, the IMF played a key role in contributing to the bailout fund and approving austerity measures. However, the crisis is an ongoing issue and there is no light of hope that it will be remediated in the nearest future. The IMF and the EU must institutionalize policies for dealing with fiscal irresponsibility and government defaults. The IMF needs to examine its policies since the beginning of the crisis and create a crisis plan for dealing with debt crisis throughout the world economies.