Agreement on a Global Firewall, but Little Beyond That

Meetings of finance ministers and central bankers here over the weekend started with a pledge by wealthy nations to significantly increase the lending capacity of the International Monetary Fund to defend against the possibility of worsening economic conditions in the debt-laden euro zone.

But they ended on Sunday without a consensus on just how to speed up the economic recovery, stamp out the European debt crisis or lower unemployment around the world, officials said.

Heading into the meetings, Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the monetary fund and a former French finance minister, had called for a “Washington moment” — a shared sense of purpose about the magnitude of the challenges facing world leaders, and building momentum to tackle those challenges.

“I personally feel that that Washington moment was clearly in the room in the course of the meetings,” she said at a news conference on Saturday.

But Pascal Lamy, the director general of the World Trade Organization, said participants seemed more concerned with political considerations and poll numbers at home than with international cooperation, yielding little progress on hard questions about fostering stable, inclusive growth.

“What’s missing is a common road map,” Mr. Lamy said in an interview. “International cooperation is about doing things you don’t want to do for the common good. But they’re all focused on the short term.”

To be sure, the additional $430 billion in lending capacity contributed by developed economies like Japan, Britain, Saudi Arabia and South Korea was seen as a major achievement. The contributions came after I.M.F. economists determined that countries around the world might require up to $1 trillion in new loans because of the combined effects of the sovereign debt crisis in Europe and sluggish global economic growth. The I.M.F. agreed to raise about half that amount if Europe would raise the other half.

But finance ministers are still at odds over the effect of debt reduction on economic growth.

Many governments, particularly in Europe, believe that indebted advanced economies need to cut their budgets to maintain stability in the financial system.

“Fiscal sustainability in the United States and Japan weigh on the domestic and global outlook and require clearly spelled out consolidation strategies to reduce the risk of a sudden loss of market confidence,” Jan Kees de Jager, the Dutch finance minister, said at an I.M.F. committee meeting on Saturday.

The fund itself, however, warned that austerity could be self-defeating, undercutting growth without satisfying skittish investors in the credit markets.

“Countries were pretty divided” about the appropriate pace of fiscal consolidation, Guido Mantega, the Brazilian finance minister, told reporters, according to Reuters.

“European countries mostly believe that you just need to carry on the fiscal consolidation and economies will adjust,” he said. “But the I.M.F. showed a worrisome picture” if too many countries cut too fast.

Robert B. Zoellick, the outgoing president of the World Bank, echoed those concerns in an interview. “Macroeconomic stabilization, both in fiscal and monetary policies, is necessary but not sufficient,” he said, calling for more attention to the “equally important and under-recognized” issue of reforms for stable, long-term growth.

Nor was the I.M.F. fund-raising accomplished without dissent. Although a dozen countries came forward to join the euro zone in pledging money, there remained differing opinions on what the new pledges meant and how they should be used, and many countries remained on the sidelines.

Canada, for instance, declined to contribute new money to the fund, arguing that Europe had more than enough money to handle its own sovereign debt crisis. “They need to step up to the plate and overwhelm this issue with their own resources,” Jim Flaherty, the Canadian finance minister, told reporters.

The United States also chose not to contribute to the I.M.F., though officials said that Washington supported the efforts to bolster the fund as long as Europe was playing the dominant role in preventing speculative attacks on European sovereign debt and stabilizing the Continent’s financial system.