In principle, international financial institutions (IFIs) can use their leverage as creditors to prompt governments to undertake policy reform. Yet such lending has been frequently linked to unsustainable debt levels and little reform. This paper illustrates how the dual roles of IFIs as...

IMF programmes are frequently criticised for lacking focus and being ineffective in helping maintain private credit lines following a debt crisis. We develop a theoretical model to explore the interlinkages between result-based conditionality and creditor collective action problems. The model...

There is a perception that IMF programmes are not catalytic and instead associated with large capital outflows, higher refinancing costs for sovereigns and adverse movements in stock markets. This has led to concerns that an expectation of adverse effects of IMF programmes may deter countries...

This paper analyses the history and effectiveness of the two major mechanisms of resolution of balance of payments crisis. It argues that IMF lending has met its counter-cyclical objectives through history and has been improving in terms of providing adequate lending facilities as well as...

This paper presents a model to explain how IMF programmes can catalyse private capital flows following a financial crisis, a concept that was at the heart of the IMF's strategy for dealing with capital account crises in the late 1990s. In the model, the IMF lends funds below the prevailing...

The paper provides a critical review of empirical studies on IMF induced moral hazard. Taken together, there is considerable evidence that the insurance provided by the Fund leads to moral hazard with investors in bond markets, while moral hazard in equity markets has so far not been...

The IMF creates "moral hazard," when it provides bailouts to countries that face a BOP crisis. Two central questions are posed: is moral hazard observable in the data; and, if it is, what is its magnitude? We search for evidence that the unprecedented bailouts of the last decade have changed the...

Empirical evidence demonstrates that credit standards, including lending margins and collateral requirements, move in a countercyclical direction. In this study, we construct a small open economy model with financial frictions to generate the countercyclical movement in credit standards. Our...

Theoretical models predict that countries with unchanged long-run savings preferences will respond to debt relief by running up new debts or by running down assets. And there are some signs that incremental debt relief over the past two decades has fulfilled those predictions. Debt relief is...

The international effort to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 has given fresh prominence to the idea of poverty traps, a notion that was widely current in the 1950s. This idea, most actively promoted by economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and...