Growth, poverty and the IMF

Bird, Graham

doi:10.1002/jid.1111

Cited by 19 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…There are serious methodological problems here: the basic one being to know what would have happened in the absence of the intervention (Bird, 2004). Assessing the impact of such a project rests less on proving impacts than on showing improvement in practice (Hulme, 2000;Mayoux and Mosedale, 2005).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reducing landslide risk in areas of unplanned housing in the Caribbean—a Government‐Community partnership model

Anderson

Holcombe

Williams³

2006

J of Intl Development

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Unplanned housing developments in vulnerable communities on steep tropical and subtropical hillslopes in many developing countries pose major problems for the residents themselves; for Governments, in terms of potential relocation costs; for engineers in determining the precise nature of the hazard and risk; and for donor agencies, such as the World Bank, in establishing the form of disaster mitigation policies that should be promoted. We present a new low-cost, community-based approach to landslide risk reduction in such a context. It is founded on the vision that there is often sufficient capacity within Governments to address such landslide issues without needing to incur significant additional costs by employing non-Government specialist staff. Such expenditure adds to debt and only suboptimally builds within-country capacity. The approach we present develops a cross-ministry Government management team, implements a community-based approach to landslide risk assessment, develops low-cost interventions through the social intervention fund and builds capacity through community knowledge transfer. We report on the successful pilot undertaken in the Skate Town community,

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reducing landslide risk in areas of unplanned housing in the Caribbean—a Government‐Community partnership model

Anderson

Holcombe

Williams³

2006

J of Intl Development

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“…There are powerful arguments for continuing to seek to improve the design and effectiveness of conditionality and there are various ways in which this might be done which we have not explored in this survey (although the author has done so elsewhere; for example, Bird, 1995, 1998, 2001b,d, 2004). This having been said, the results from the vast literature on the impact of IMF conditionality reveal few real surprises.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Imf: A Bird's Eye View of Its Role and Operations

Bird

2007

Journal of Economic Surveys

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The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is the world's premier international financial institution with 184 member countries and active programmes in a significant number of them at any one time. The Fund attracts a great deal of attention, much of it critical. But the discussion is often polemic in style. Strongly held, but frequently opposing, views are expressed. This survey attempts to examine, in an objective way, the theory and evidence relating to the Fund's operations. Many aspects of the empirical research are relatively recent and a universal consensus is yet to emerge; as a consequence there is scope for disagreement to persist. However, the research is also gradually clarifying many important issues. The format for the survey is to examine the life cycle of IMF arrangements. What makes a country turn to the Fund for assistance? Should the IMF be lending? What influences the outcome of negotiations and the design of programmes? Are IMF programmes effective? And why do some countries make prolonged use of IMF resources? For completeness there is also some discussion of the history of the IMF, the extent to which Fund policies have been influenced by advances in economic theory and the Fund's systemic role. Important organisational and governance issues are also covered briefly. Although primarily adopting an economist's perspective, the survey reflects the growing recognition that in order to understand the IMF's operations, economics has to be combined with politics. Examining the IMF is an exercise in applied political economy.

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“…It is similar to the aforementioned devaluation argument, in the sense that the ones involved in the tradables sector of an average Third World country are poor small farmers or simple agricultural workers. Others stress the fact that there exists a relationship between expansionary monetary and fiscal policies, the creation of budget deficits, inflation, and as a result, current account imbalances and a bloating foreign debt (Wiesner, 1985;Rodrik, 1996;Bird, 2004). Others have argued more explicitly about the effectiveness of some contractionary fiscal policies as a means for preventing such undesirable phenomena, which can even lead to pro-poor results if properly implemented (Adam and Bevan, 2001;Ames, Brown, Devarajan and Izquierdo, 2001).…”

Section: The Imf-poverty Controversy In Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%