By Andrea Thomas

BERLIN--The Trump administration's criticisms of some countries' trade policies have a degree of legitimacy and shouldn't all be dismissed outright, a senior International Monetary Fund official said Tuesday.

"It's the role of this (U.S.) administration to level the playing field and to restore some balance on behalf of the American people," David Lipton, the IMF's second-most senior official, told a conference in Berlin. "The key is to try to look at what they say as a diagnosis and to help them sort out what really does make sense and what doesn't."

He said there were "elements of truth to some of their complaints, even when they misframe them," and that legitimate concerns should be addressed.

While it would be wrong to describe China as a currency manipulator, for example, it would be sensible for the world's second-largest economy to rely less on exports for growth, Mr. Lipton said.

He added that a a bilateral approach to resolving imbalances, as favored by President Donald Trump, mightn't be as successful as the multilateral approached favored by the IMF. Mr. Lipton said the IMF was more committed than ever to multilateralism in tackling the side-effects of globalization.

Mr. Trump was elected in 2016 on an anti-globalization platform. After taking office in January, he withdrew U.S. support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and said he would focus on forging bilateral deals with individual countries. He also pledged to confront China and renegotiate the two-decade-old North American Free Trade Agreement, with a view to protecting U.S. jobs.

Mr. Lipton called on Europe, and Germany in particular, as the current chair of the Group of 20 large world economies, to help support an international approach to problem-solving.

Speaking at the same conference, Gesa Miehe-Nordmeyer, a senior aide to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said a focus of Berlin's G-20 presidency would be to make the world economy more resilient to crises.

--Write to Andrea Thomas at andrea.thomas@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 21, 2017 09:00 ET (14:00 GMT)