IFI governance

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IEO on IMF in Jordan: “moderately successful”

23 January 2006

The Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) has said that the IMF’s role in Jordan in the period 1989 – 2004 was “moderately successful”. The IEO said the Fund was “important in reinforcing necessary macroeconomic discipline and helping advance key reforms”. Criticisms include the failure to provide “a clear rationale for the magnitude and composition of targeted adjustment”; adopting benchmarks on privatisation “that were not well designed”; and ineffective collaboration with the World Bank in the area of public expenditure policy. One of the key lessons was the need for “alternative policy options”, since short-term quantitative targets which lack analysis of the underlying strategies needed to achieve them “are likely to be unsuccessful”.