American politicization of the International Monetary Fund

Professional ties that bind: how normative orientations shape IMF conditionality

“…I therefore use In each of these cases the staff applied strict treatment to government officials, with whom they shared few professional ties, because of doubts as to their commitment to IMF policy goals (Boughton, 2001;Momani, 2004 While larger loans carry rejection costs that provide an incentive for any present or future government to act in accordance with IMF policy goals (Vreeland 2003), more lenient conditionality would provide a government with greater capacity to act independently and thus assume additional risk since the conditionality contract could not be easily rewritten. In addition, reformist officials sharing IMF policy goals may oppose more lenient treatment as a way of binding the opposition (both in the present and the future) (Vreeland 2003).…”

Seeing like the IMF: Institutional change in small open economies

“…The Fund's advice is not always influential, nor can it always act autonomously. As with Fund conditionality in loan programs (see Momani, 2004), major powers like the US sometimes seek to use Fund surveillance of non-borrowing states as a tool to achieve their own strategic ends. For instance, the US Treasury has recently made calls for the intensification of multilateral analysis in the Fund's bilateral surveillance to identify global exchange rate imbalances (read: US-China trade deficit) (Adams, 2006).…”

The International Politics of Ireland's EU/IMF Bailout

“…Going beyond mere anecdotes, systematic qualitative research has already illustrated the importance of the United States in selected lending cases; according to Bessma Momani, the United States intervened in 1987 and 1991 to secure lenient IMF treatment for Egypt in order to preserve the political stability of the pro-Western Egyptian regime during that period. 6 Are these once-off interventions or does the US regularly use and abuse the IMF? In the first quantitative study of US influence at the IMF, Strom Thacker examined the relationship between voting patterns at the United Nations and the probability that a country would receive a loan from the IMF and found that countries which moved towards the US position on key issues were more likely to get a loan.…”