Forum on “Faith and Economics”

Does economic success result only from pursuing self-interest, or do we also need to base our actions on ethical values? On which values should the IMF base its work?

These questions underpinned a full day of discussions at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, last month, as a distinguished panel examined the relationship between faith and economics. One panelist was former Managing Director, Michel Camdessus, who explained that his active interest in these questions had been triggered by discussions with Czech President Václav Havel and with Pope John Paul II in 1991. Throughout the rest of his time at the IMF, he had taken every opportunity to meet with religious leaders of all faiths. Economists, he concluded, had much to learn from people whose life task was to foster human development and human dignity. Without a sense of universal ethics and individual responsibility, economic development was unlikely to flourish. To buttress the point, Camdessus paraphrased a line often attributed to André Malraux, that "the 21st century will be a century of ethics, or it will not be at all." Full text