Playing Favorites
This chapter examines quantitative evidence linking shared economic beliefs to variation in the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) treatment of borrowers. It first discusses the measures of IMF treatment before turning to the (indirect) indicators of policymakers' economic beliefs that are then used to construct the key variable in the analysis: the ideational distance between the IMF and the borrowing country. It also evaluates data related to the generosity, conditionality, and enforcement of nearly 500 IMF programs signed in the 1980s and 1990s. The goal is to determine whether borrowing governments with policymakers who shared beliefs with the IMF received bigger loans, fewer conditions, and easier enforcement of the conditions. The results of quantitative analysis show that there is a pattern of favoritism in a large sample of the Fund programs.