ASHINGTON - Wading into an arcane debate that nonetheless has broad implications for the world economy, the Republican presidential candidate Steve Forbes called yesterday for the closing of the International Monetary Fund, the lending agency that arranged rescue loans for countries caught in the economic crisis of the past two years.
Forbes laid out his views in a speech in Bretton Woods, N.H., where finance ministers gathered in 1944 to create the IMF, the World Bank, and the rules for international currency exchange that stood for about 30 years.
Separately, another GOP candidate, Gary Bauer, issued a press release yesterday calling for the abolition of the IMF, raising the possibility that the once-obscure agency could become a focal point of the presidential campaign. Patrick J. Buchanan, also a Republican candidate, has criticized the IMF for years.
The 182-nation IMF is a major force in the economic lives of many countries, particularly poor ones. Though it remains largely unknown to Americans, its role has been hotly debated in Washington in the past two years. It is one of the few issues where the right in US politics converges with the left, as some leading liberal Democrats have joined Republicans in calling for an overhaul of the agency.
''I congratulate Mr. Forbes for focusing on this issue,'' Representative Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland, said yesterday. ''If the only thing that came out of this election season was reform of the IMF, that would be a big deal for a lot of the world.''
The IMF was conceived as a bank, funded by its member nations, that would make loans to countries that faced short-term problems in keeping their exchange rates stable. The United States contributes the most money.
In 1997, the agency took a high profile after the currency of Thailand collapsed and touched off an economic crisis that spread to Indonesia, South Korea, and then to Brazil and Russia. As nations slipped into recession and millions of people fell into poverty, the IMF made tens of millions of dollars in rescue loans.
Today, there is wide debate about the IMF's performance. Some say the bank deserves credit for helping end recession in South Korea and Thailand, and for restoring those nations to economic growth.
Forbes joined the critics who say the opposite: that the IMF made the crisis worse. They say the IMF, in return for its loans, required nations to raise interest rates and taxes, to cut subsidies to the poor, and adopt other changes that help bankers but hurt citizens.
''It's an agency that has now become extremely harmful around the world,'' Forbes said in a phone interview. ''They violate the first rule of medicine, which is, `Don't harm the patient - do no harm.'''
Forbes also echoed the complaints, made mostly by conservative critics, that the IMF helps create economic crises. ''If you didn't have the IMF, then lenders and investors would pay more attention'' to the riskiness of their loans to developing nations, he said.
Left alone, investors and banks could have sorted out the Asian and Latin American crises better than the IMF did, Forbes said. He also expressed skepticism about the IMF's sister agency, the World Bank, and of the US Agency for International Development.
But Forbes said he did not oppose all international agencies and had hopes that the World Trade Organization would be successful in its mission of lowering trade barriers and arbitrating trade disputes among nations. That sets him apart from Buchanan, who has called US support for the WTO part of a ''march into captivity'' by supporters of a single worldwide government.
Eliminating the IMF ''is still fringe thinking,'' said Robert Litan, who directs economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. ''The general view is mend the IMF, don't end it.'' Most major business lobbies say the IMF plays an important role in keeping the global economy stable.
A spokesman for Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican and presidential candidate, said the senator ''generally would not call'' for eliminating the IMF but has criticized the agency's work in Russia, where there are accusations that IMF loans were misused and that the government misled the IMF about its finances during negotiations for a $4.5 billion loan last year. A spokesman for Texas Governor George W. Bush said the governor would not support giving more money to Russia but had made no statement about the IMF's future.
The campaigns of GOP candidates Elizabeth Dole and Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, did not return phone calls.
