The International Monetary Fund has been out of the limelight for the past few months as the travails of the World Bank have taken more of the public's attention.

But, at this year's annual meetings, the Fund will once again take centre stage as its new managing director, Horst Kohler, sets out his vision for the organisation's future.

Since taking over earlier this year after an interminable and damaging appointment process, Mr Kohler has spent most of his time as managing director on a grand tour of the globe, taking in Africa, Asia and Latin America. He has also made the Fund's future an issue by setting up strategy groups of the organisation's senior staff, raising the possibility of some fundamental changes in the way it does business.

Seasoned Fund-watchers have been monitoring his progress with interest, and trying to discern his likely opinions from the snippets of comment he has distributed.

The overall direction of his policy seems clear: Mr Kohler wants to refocus the Fund on its traditional core role of promoting macroeconomic stability, and away from the business of long-term development lending. Last month, Mr Kohler told a press conference in Washington that the Fund had been "overstretched" in the past, and that it should not be a "regulatory superpower".

He also admitted that the IMF had made mistakes in the past - though he gave the impression that these were of the nature of failing to prevent crises occurring, rather than making specific criticisms of the way the Fund had reacted once a crisis had begun.

One area in which Mr Kohler has surprised some observers is the vexed question of private sector involvement in bailing out crisis-ridden countries. As a German, Mr Kohler was initially expected to take the traditional line of his government and lean towards a strong presumption that commercial banks should be forcibly involved in bail-outs, if necessary by a set of rules to be applied in all circumstances.

But, at a speech in Paris in May, where he expressed some substantive statements of intent, Mr Kohler made distinctly soothing noises towards the private sector. He offered banks the possibility of "constructive engagement" and proposed the establishment of a new Capital Markets Consultative Group which would establish a round table for bankers and Fund staff to discuss financial stability.

Since then, representatives of the private sector, such as the Institute for International Finance, have pronounced themselves very encouraged by his attitude.

In all these areas, Mr Kohler has placed himself firmly in the US camp of thinking. His views appear almost indistinguishable from those of the US treasury secretary, Larry Summers.

Other statements Mr Kohler has made on his travels appear to have been in the nature of kite-flying, rather than making substantive promises to act. While touring Asia, he responded to questioning by making sympathetic noises about the possibility of an Asian monetary fund, though he was careful to say that this would complement, rather than supplant the work of the Fund.

He also expressed a willingness to look at reassessing the quotas for IMF funding - a move which would almost certainly give Asian countries, particularly those from emerging markets, more votes on the Fund's board.

Both these moves could be seen as attempts to placate the demands of Asian countries that the IMF reassess its policy and decision-making processes. Some discontent with the Fund remains in the region in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, where the Fund was widely blamed for imposing pre-determined crisis management policies on the region, including fiscal retrenchment at a time of already severe shocks to demand. The US was widely suspected as the architect of these policies.

A sideshow to the row over the appointment of Mr Kohler was Japan's nomination of Eisuke Sakakibara, its senior financial diplomat, as the Fund's managing director. It had little chance of success, but was used by Japan to express its discontent with the policies of the Fund.

Mr Kohler, although his policy pronouncements appear close to those of the US, seems to be keen to take all the Fund's major shareholders with him, and this openness towards an increased role for Asian countries may be one way of achieving it.

The challenge for Mr Kohler is to set out exactly how his vision of the IMF's future can be matched with specific concrete policies to ensure that it can be implemented. Some country representatives in Washington think that Mr Kohler has left hostages to fortune in making sympathetic noises to interested parties such as the Asian countries and the private sector, and that he will find it much harder to please them with actual progress.