The IMF Prescription for Structural Adjustment in Tanzania

2014 ◽  
pp. 141-162
Keyword(s):  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
The Imf

scholarly journals A Critical Evaluation of IMF History and Policies

2018 ◽  
Vol 04 (S1) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Syed Ahmed ◽  
Abdulhamid Sukar ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Exchange Rate ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Developing Economies ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
International Banking ◽  
Rate System ◽  
Exchange Rate System ◽  
The International Monetary Fund ◽  
The Imf

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was originally mandated to maintain exchange rate stability and adjustment of external imbalances in member countries and to act as a lender for countries facing short-term balance-of-payment crises. With the breakdown of the fixed exchange rate system, the IMF had to adjust its role in exchange rate management. The international banking crisis in the 1980s required a recalibration of IMF policies. Most of the policies in the 1980s and 1990s were driven by “Washington Consensus,” a doctrinaire view of economic development that called for structural adjustment through market liberalization and privatizations. However, critics indicate that the IMF, by failing to consider the unique conditions in developing economies and lumping them under a “one size fits all,” category may have caused more damage than good. In addition, it was alleged that IMF loans imposed unrealistic conditions on borrowers. All these policies are under review now in a quest for appropriate policies that will address some of these concerns and aid economic development. This paper provides a brief review of IMF policies from a historical perspective and a critique of IMF policies over the last few decades.

Can Effective Industrial Restructuring be Compatible with Market- Oriented Structural Adjustment Policies? The Evidence from Turkey

1995 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 51-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fikret Şenses
Keyword(s):  
World Bank ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Import Substitution ◽  
Bretton Woods ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
Adjustment Program ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
Bretton Woods Institutions ◽  
The Imf

One of the main objectives of the Stabilization and Structural Adjustment Program (SSAP) introduced in Turkey in January 1980 was to transform the industrial trade strategy from archetypal import-substitution to export-orientation and to attain a higher level of integration with the international economy through market-based policies. International financial institutions like the IMF and, in particular, the World Bank have been closely involved in this process. Apart from a number of stand-by agreements with the IMF, Turkey received five successive structural adjustment loans from the World Bank during 1980-84 with their conditionality extending into a wide range of spheres like import liberalization, export promotion, and financial liberalization. Not only was Turkey one of the first to conclude such agreements with the World Bank, it was also identified as one of the countries complying with their provisions with “low slippage”.3 Even when there were no formal agreements, successive governments since 1980 have had very close and amicable relations with both of these Bretton Woods institutions.

scholarly journals How healthy is a ‘healthy economy’? Incompatibility between current pathways towards SDG3 and SDG8

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (Supplement_5) ◽  
Author(s):  
M Koutsoumpa ◽  
M Meurs ◽  
L Seidelmann ◽  
B Fienieg ◽  
K Kramer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Health Spending ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Policy Advice ◽  
Social Spending ◽  
Gdp Growth ◽  
Policy Objective ◽  
National Policies ◽  
The Imf

Abstract Background The link between health and the economy is well known. However, economic growth as measured in SDG8, continues to leave people behind and the funding gap for realizing SDG3 for good health and well-being remains vast. International financial institutions, i.e. the IMF, influence national policies in ways that may undermine the SDGs. We examine incoherencies between economic growth and health goals in Malawi, Uganda, and Tanzania. Methods We conducted qualitative research based on policy analysis. To analyse IMF policy advice in the three countries we reviewed relevant program documents, article IV consultation reports (2016-18) and literature on structural adjustment. We accessed health information from WHO and World Bank databases, and national policies. Results In all three countries, some indicators, e.g. infant and child mortality, improved, but others lag behind. Underfunding is a major cause for poor health and inequities. GDP increases (as a measure of economic growth) do not automatically translate to increases in health spending. Health expenditure from domestic public resources remains much lower than international thresholds. To achieve this level of spending domestically, GDP in these countries would require an unrealistic manifold increase. IMF policy advice and loan conditionality that focus on GDP growth and tight monetary and fiscal targets impair social spending, while suggested taxation measures are generally regressive. Conclusions The GDP-focused SDG8 can delay efforts towards the SDG3 if governments opt to focus on GDP growth without measures to equally distribute wealth and invest in social sectors, often under IMF's influence. Although the IMF has acknowledged the importance of social development, its policy advice still adheres to austerity, harming population health. To realize the SDGs everywhere, governments should abandon GDP growth as a policy objective, strive for equitable economic development and emphasise global co-operation. Key messages GDP increases do not automatically translate to an increase of health spending, partly a result of IMF structural adjustment programs and policy advice. To realize the SDGs everywhere, governments should abandon GDP growth as a policy objective and place more emphasis on SDG17 on global co-operation.

False Accounting as Formalizing Practices

2021 ◽  
Vol 53 (6) ◽  
pp. 81-110
Author(s):  
Boris Samuel
Keyword(s):  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Household Consumption ◽  
Alternative Methods ◽  
National Accounting ◽  
Programming Tool ◽  
Data Production ◽  
Macroeconomic Indicators ◽  
Monitoring And Surveillance ◽  
The Imf

This article studies the inference procedures used to compute the macroeconomic indicators feeding into the International Monetary Fund’s monitoring and surveillance in Africa since the structural adjustment. In 2005, the IMF launched a procedure to denounce a Mauritanian “misreporting” over a twelve-year period. The article wonders how could the statistical fiction be validated by the IMF economists, and to what extent they took part in Mauritanian data production. The article argues that the auditor-auditee relation places less importance on the veracity and the pertinence of numbers than on the formal conformity of data and economic programs with expectations of the IMF bureaucracy. For programs and statistics to be considered consistent, tables of estimates must be filled out, even when data are missing, and the economic diagnosis must comply with monetarist-dominant orientations. By analyzing the financial programming tool, the article shows that the treatment of basic national accounting identities neglects variables like household consumption even when alternative methods exist. Changes in methods may be discarded to ensure the legibility of economic works over the years. The article therefore argues that the IMF and countries coproduce false accounts, whereby inferences of macroeconomic estimates serve other institutional functions inside the IMF besides veracity.

Aesthetics After Austerity: Boubacar Boris Diop and the Work of Literature in Neoliberal Senegal

2019 ◽  
pp. 203-232
Author(s):  
Tobias Warner
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Political Action ◽  
The State ◽  
Vernacular Language ◽  
Cultural Field ◽  
Regulative Ideal ◽  
Boubacar Boris Diop ◽  
Language Literature ◽  
The Imf

Beginning in the 1980s, Senegal became one of the first countries to accept structural adjustment loans from the IMF, resulting in a period of intense deregulation, privatization, and withdrawal of the state. The effects of structural adjustment were felt across the cultural field. As the state ceased trying to dictate the terms of culture, the horizon of political action for Wolof language literature and literacy activism shifted as well. This chapter examines how the oppositional stance of vernacular language advocates has been remade since the heyday of state-centered cultural policy. Since 1980 it has become difficult to sustain the nation-language-people unity that has often served as a regulative ideal for vernacularizations since Herder. Focusing on the work of the novelist Boubacar Boris Diop, this chapter analyzes how vernacular writers take stock of their age of austerity by developing strategies that satirize, query, and critique the uncertainties of literary address.

scholarly journals Ecuador: Into the abyss thanks to the structural adjustment policies of the Extended Fund Agreement with the IMF

2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (80) ◽  
pp. 541-566
Author(s):  
Katiuska King Mantilla ◽  
Pablo Samaniego Ponce
Keyword(s):  
Central Bank ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Central Bank Independence ◽  
Real Sector ◽  
The Real ◽  
Adjustment Policies ◽  
External Sector ◽  
The Imf

This paper analyses the scope, origins, justification, and commitments of the extended fund arrangement (EFA) signed by the Ecuadorian government and the IMF in March 2019. This agreement, which represents a little more than a third of Argentina’ Stand-By Agreement, promotes Central Bank independence, austerity, as well as structural adjustment policies, but its basic’ diagnosis omits external sector problems. This paper presents the implications and contradictions of the agreement to promote structural changes in the real sector and how these foster policies that protect the interests of bondholders and bankers.

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