Conditionality of IMF and World Bank Loans: Tutelage Over Sovereign States?

The normativity of numbers: World Bank and IMF conditionality

Good governance reforms aim at transforming African state bureaucracies into efficient, transparent, and accountable institutions. These policies are inserted into the national administrative apparatus by means of conditions attached to the financial support of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Although the conditions exactly match the priorities of these international f...

A public choice perspective of IMF and World Bank lending and conditionality ∗

The paper explains IMF and World Bank lending and conditionality stressing changes in relative bargaining power of different stakeholders over time. It applies public choice theory to explain the interests of the institutions’ member states, its borrowers and staffs as well as private actors attaching their money to the IFIs’ programs. Using panel data for 43 countries between 1987–99 it is sho...

IMF Conditionality

This paper presents a principal-agent model of IMF conditional lending, in the aftermath of a “capital-account” liquidity crisis. We show that traditional ex-post conditionality can be e¤ective in safeguarding the Fund’s resources, allowing for the provision of e¢cient emergency lending and reducing ine¢cient ex-ante credit rationing if the capital out‡ow which triggers the crisis is not excess...

Are “New” Donors Challenging World Bank Conditionality?

This paper investigates whether World Bank conditionality is affected by the presence of “new” donors by using panel data for 54 African countries over the 1980 to 2013 period. Empirical results indicate that the World Bank delivers loans with significantly fewer conditions to recipient countries which are assisted by China. Less stringent conditionality is also observed in better off borrowers...

Reform of the IMF and World Bank