Opposition to the Washington Consensus: The IMF and Social Policy Reforms in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

Financial collapse forced Russia into an agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1998. As part of its conditionality the IMF demanded severe cuts to the country’s social security system, which led to a public backlash against the agreement. However, six years later, after Russia had repaid all its debts to the IMF and started pursuing its economic policy independently, it re-introduced the monetisation of in-kind social benefits—one of the key reforms it had failed to implement as part of the earlier IMF agreement. The analysis of a similar reform attempt with and without IMF involvement shows that domestic policy-makers can genuinely subscribe to neoliberal reforms. It also helps to assess the IMF’s “mixed” approach to domestic opposition against its conditionality.

Accounting for Failure Through Morality: The IMF’s Involvement in (Mis)managing the Greek Crisis

“…The IMF's intervention in Greece is not an isolated case (Vreeland, 2007): financial help in exchange for social and economic reforms applies to many other countries (Boughton and Mourmouras, 2004), and the similar but less severely applied mechanisms operate in other Eurozone countries, such as Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Cyprus (Kopits, 2016). In these and many other instances (Pleines, 2022;Masters et al, 2021), supranational institutions actively, if not aggressively, perpetuate inequalities in aid-receiving countries in the name of financial stability, benefitting the financial institutions (Pénet, 2018).…”

“…These reforms concern structural adjustment policies that have long-term economic and social impacts in various countries, often provoking policy resistance by the countries involved and ongoing criticism of outcomes by the public at large (Pleines, 2022;Masters et al, 2021;Pénet, 2018). Yet despite the prominent role of reform-leading institutions in reinforcing change in the global arena (Kincaid, 2016;Neu et al, 2018), very little is known about the processes and mechanisms that account for the reforms' outcomes and their moral legitimacy (Covaleski et al, 2013;Papava, 2009).…”