New York - The poor and developing countries who make up most of the UN General Assembly will get a chance on Thursday to face off against rich countries in a debate on the global financial crisis.

One target is the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Under the leadership of a former priest and foreign minister of Nicaragua's Sandinista government that fought the US in the 1980s, the assembly will demand a radical reform of those two institutions created at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the 1940s to help countries recover from the devastation of World War II.

Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, a former Maryknoll Catholic priest, has sided with the world's dispossessed and called for the democratization of the United Nations, which he said is dominated by rich Western nations.

"There is a widespread concern that the global economic governance arrangements, set in place in 1944 at a meeting in Bretton Woods ... need to be radically reformed to be responsive to current economic conditions," he said when calling for Thursday's session. Miguel d'Escoto said the "inadequacies" of the current global banking institutions have been responsible for decisions that resulted in today's crisis. The spiralling high prices of food and energy have made living conditions worse in poor countries.

"Developing countries are now net creditors to the global economic system and have an abiding interest in a rules-based and impartial revamping of global financial policies and institutions," he said.

He has appointed a panel of distinguished economists to lead the UN response to the crisis. It is to be headed by the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics Joseph Stiglitz, a prolific writer and critic of US President George W Bush's foreign and economic policies.

Stiglitz said last week that US markets had lost some legitimacy as the world pace setter and it was time for the world body to enter the debate.

Bush has convened a finance summit in Washington on November 15 of the G-20 leaders to try to resolve the economic meltdown despite calls for him to instead back a UN-led meeting.

"The hope is that it (the G-20 summit) will begin a process, set the agenda and it needs to be a multilateral approach in which the voices of all the countries are heard," Stiglitz said.

"The UN is the one source of international legitimacy," he said. "I think that some aspects of the old order, in which US financial market were seen as a font of wisdom and the source of stability to the global economy, are over."

"They have lost that legitimacy," he said. "In that context it's very important that the UN is one place where all nations come together because this global financial crisis is beginning to affect everybody."

The UN panel will discuss ways to review the role of the World Bank and IMF in the worst global finance meltdown since the Great Depression of the 1930s. (dpa)