It is in the nature of international financial institutions (IFIs) that they only tend to come to public attention when things go wrong.

Each crisis is accompanied by a burst of publicity and activity followed by a lengthy post-mortem. The challenge for the IFIs is to use the momentum of the event to overcome institutional inertia, establish a consensus on what went wrong and change crisis management procedures or policies for the future.

The difficulty policymakers face is that consensus is difficult to achieve. For some, the Asian and Russian financial crises are clear evidence that the International Monetary Fund's traditional deflationary prescription in times of crisis may be mistaken.

Joe Stiglitz, the former chief economist of the World Bank, who excoriated the IMF over its handling of the crisis, has said that the familiar package of fiscal retrenchment was completely inappropriate. This view certainly receives support in some of the affected countries. But, the Fund has yet to be convinced that its approach is fundamentally mistaken.

What is clear to most is that the appetite of the Group of Seven (G7) rich countries to fund multibillion-dollar rescue packages is severely limited. Everyone agrees that some mechanism must be found to prevent the need for such rescues, and then to limit their size when a crisis does occur.

But, although the starkness of disagreements between G7 countries may have diminished, there is still sufficient disagreement to mean that stated policies have hitherto proved to be too vague.

The debate is usually characterised as follows: in one camp, the German and French governments dislike any form of automatic help for countries in crisis, believing it creates a moral hazard and encourages governments to take risks. Allegedly, they prefer a set of rules which imposes standstills on foreign debt repayments when crisis-hit countries are in danger of defaulting, and which forces private sector investors to share the costs of any bail-out.

The US is supposed to be instinctively wary of compelling the private sector to become involved, wanting to treat private sector bail-ins on a case-by-case basis and preferring a limited but automatic lending facility for which countries can pre- qualify.

In practice, the actual disagreements are less acute. French officials, for example, although publicly supporting the German position, often soften their line when it comes to practicalities.

Certainly, the G7 was able to find enough common ground to add an appendix to its communique during the spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank, setting out the operational guidelines to be followed in determining the optimal amount of private sector involvement. But the document was short on specifics. It said IMF programmes should "strike an appropriate balance between the contributions of the private external creditors and the official external creditors, in light of financing provided by IFIs", without giving any indication of how the appropriateness or otherwise of the balance should be determined.

And, by placing responsibility for negotiating with creditors firmly on the stricken countries themselves - "the international official community should not micromanage the details of any debt restructuring or debt reduction negotiations", the communique said - it cast further doubt on the possibility of a consistent uniform policy.

Unless the G7 finance ministers can firm up a line at this year's meetings, the debate is likely to rumble on without any clear conclusion, with a slow process of iteration towards an uneasy compromise. The idea that this will readily provide an easily applied set of rules when the next large liquidity crisis comes along is difficult to envisage.

Meanwhile, the process of ensuring that countries adhere to standards of information disclosure and codes which govern their policies - both of which are intended to provide early warnings of incipient crises - is making steadier, but still slow, progress. The ultimate aim is to make the reports on the observance of standards and codes (ROSCs) a permanent part of the IMF's regular Article IV health-checks on its member countries.

But, with emerging market countries wary of what they see as the G7-dominated IMF trying to impose external standards upon them, the supporters of openness are making slow progress. Their tactic appears to be to let some countries voluntarily publish outside assessments of their policy - such as the ROSCs, or the IMF staff section of Article IV reports, or the newer Financial System Stability Assessments which look at the ability of a country's financial system to stand up to external shocks - in the hope that this will shame others into doing so.

This soft-pedalling approach may be the best way of making progress without provoking opposition. But, achieving transparency this way is a slow process, and there is no guarantee that it will put in place a system of disclosure sufficient to prevent a crisis before the next big shock to the global economy.