Conditionality

News

IMF fails to include social impact in review

5 April 2011

In mid March, the IMF released a concept note outlining the scope of its internal conditionality review (see Update 74), to be published before the Fund’s annual meetings in September. The note states that the IMF will look at “how programmes have taken account of the social impact of planned policy measures”, but does not mention an analysis of the actual impacts that Fund-required policy reforms have on borrowing countries. Nuria Molina of Brussel-based NGO Eurodad criticised the note for revealing the review’s “limited scope”, and said “it confirms civil society groups’ fears that the IMF would not actually take measuring the impacts of conditionality seriously”.