The international financial system has made a major, direct and sustained contribution to global poverty for the past 30 years. It has worsened it. It has done so in two main ways. First, the analytical framework and perspective the International Monetary Fund has brought to its role in...

This paper uses a fixed-effects model to analyze the effect of IMF programs on poverty with data from 82 countries during 1985 to 2000. Two indicators of poverty, infant mortality rates and the Human Development Index (HDI), are utilized, and the effects of the IMF's concessionary and...