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IMF conditionalities in Nicaragua

In an interview for Intermón Oxfam (Spain), the economist Adolfo Acevedo Vogl explains the different forms in which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) interferes in the economic, social and political life of Nicaragua. The consequences of this practice are reflected in the quality of life of the population. (Coordinadora Civil, 17 July 2006)

http://ifis.choike.org/informes/385.html

(Added: Fri Dec 15 2006   Hits: 95)

Kicking the Habit: How the World Bank and the IMF are still addicted to attaching economic policy conditions to aid

Despite numerous commitments to reform, The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are still using their aid to make developing countries implement inappropriate economic policies, with the tacit approval of rich-country governments. These economic policy conditions undermine national policy-making, delay aid flows, and often fail to deliver for poor people. If the world is to make poverty history, this practice must be stopped. Aid must be conditional on being spent transparently and on reducing poverty, and nothing more. (Oxfam, November 2006)

http://www.oxfam.org/en/policy/briefingpapers/bp96_kicking_the_habit_061127

(Added: Fri Dec 15 2006   Hits: 221)

Review of World Bank Conditionality-Issues Paper [PDF 10kb]

(World Bank) The World Bank is currently taking stock of its practices in the use of conditionality in policy-based lending, and is preparing a series of review papers of recent trends and approaches and lessons learned. For this particular review, the Bank is putting forward for comments this paper: "Review of World Bank Conditionality-Issues Paper".

http://siteresources.worldbank.org/PROJECTS/Resources/REVIEWOFBANKCONDITIONALITYJan3105.pdf

(Added: Thu Mar 24 2005   Hits: 105)

What progress? A shadow review of World Bank conditionality

A growing body of evidence about the failure of conditionality to build ownership or lead to pro-poor reform started to force a rethink about World Bank lending policy. A year after beginning its review process, One year on, the World Bank has published a rather optimistic stock-take which suggests that "recent operations are broadly consistent with the good practice principles." This shadow review assesses how the principles are affecting the overall burden and impact of conditionality. The findings are not encouraging. There is no clear plan to ensure implementation of the principles. Moreover, a limited and superficial approach towards country ownership and reluctance to embrace full transparency - reflected in the continuing use of loan conditions to push controversial economic policy reforms without the full involvement or even knowledge of the public -undermines the prospects for substantive progress. (Action Aid, 2006)

http://www.actionaid.org.uk/doc_lib/what_progress.pdf

(Added: Wed Oct 04 2006   Hits: 217)

"I am not ashamed!": HIV/AIDS and human rights in the Dominican Republic and Guyana

This report is based on the findings of research into the connection between human rights violations and HIV/AIDS in two countries in the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic and Guyana. It shows how abuses of civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights increase people's risk of HIV infection. It also shows how those affected by HIV/AIDS are denied their human rights. AI recommends a comprehensive rights-based approaches to HIV/AIDS in all areas of prevention, treatment, care and support. One of its findings is that the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the Caribbean could be combated more effectively if the U.S. removed restrictions on how its aid funding is used. (Amnesty International, 11 July 2006)

http://www.amnestyusa.org/news/document.do?id=ENGAMR010022006

(Added: Thu Jul 13 2006   Modified: Thu Jan 18 2007   Hits: 166)

"Our priority is just to survive"

Neoliberal reforms are neither what Africans need, nor what Africans want, argue activists from civil society. According to this interview with Aminata Traoré, a former minister of Mali, donor agencies are imposing their agenda on developing countries. (Development and Co-operation, No.7 2006)

http://www.inwent.org/E+Z/content/archive-eng/07-2006/foc_art5.html

(Added: Mon Oct 02 2006   Hits: 62)

A new approach to the allocation of aid among developing countries : is the USA more selfish than the rest?

University of Manchester School of Economic Studies discussion paper by Jane Harrigan and Chengang Wang.2004. Attempts to explain the factors that determine the geographical allocation of foreign aid. Develops a theoretical model and uses panel data taking account of the truncated nature of the dependent variable. The authors run regressions for different groups of donors (USA, non-USA bilateral and multilateral). They find that all the donors respond to recipient need in their allocation of aid, but compared to the rest the USA puts less emphasis on need and more emphasis on donor interest e.g. geopolitical, commercial, and other links with specific recipients. Concludes that the USA is a more selfish aid donor than other bilateral and multilateral donors when allocating its aid.

http://les.man.ac.uk/ses/research/Discussion_paper_0412.pdf

(Added: Tue Oct 26 2004   Modified: Tue Jul 19 2005   Hits: 205)

Afghanistan, Inc: A Corpowatch Investigative Report (pdf)

Fariba Nawa, an Afghan-American who returned to her native country to examine the progress of reconstruction, uncovers some examples of where the money has (and hasn't) gone, how the system of international aid works (and doesn't), and what it is really like in the villages and cities where outsiders are rebuilding the war-torn countryside. (Fairba Nawa, CorpWatch, May 2006)

http://corpwatch.org/downloads/CorpWatch%20Afghan%20report.pdf

(Added: Thu May 04 2006   Modified: Tue Jun 27 2006   Hits: 348)

Aid as Privatisation

Dave Prentis and Louise Richards Wednesday December 1, 2004. The Guardian. "For too long it has been the accepted practice of donors such as the UK government and the World Bank to attach a wide range of conditions to the financial assistance they offer developing countries. The message to those countries has been clear: if you don't accept the conditions, you don't get the aid. While aid is supposed to reduce poverty, the conditions attached to it have often had the opposite result."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5075380-103677,00.html

(Added: Tue Dec 14 2004   Modified: Tue Jul 19 2005   Hits: 187)

Aid Campaign: Commercialisation of Aid

The Commercialisation of Aid project seeks to address and uncover the commercial interests serviced by Australia's aid assistance. AID/WATCH is reviewing the processes and programs of the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) and the profits made by Australian private contractors derived from foreign aid projects.

http://www.aidwatch.org.au/index.php?current=16

(Added: Thu Jun 17 2004   Modified: Tue Jul 19 2005   Hits: 265)

Aid That Doesn't Deliver

Foreign Policy in Focus. By Emira Woods, February 1, 2005. The Bush administration has pledged $350 million to tsunami relief. It's a safe bet that at least $248 million of that money will be spent right here in the U.S. The U.S. government places conditions on its foreign aid that require most relief and development assistance materials and services to be purchased from U.S. companies and agencies. The last time the the government revealed any data on this issue-back in 1996-72 cents out of every U.S. foreign aid dollar was spent on U.S. goods and services.

http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2005/0502deliver.html

(Added: Mon Feb 07 2005   Modified: Tue Jul 19 2005   Hits: 240)

AusAID announces massive policy shift - Australia unties aid

By Kate Walsh. 2004-12-17. | AID/WATCH is claiming a massive campaign victory with the announcement by the Australian aid agency, AusAID, that the Australian aid budget will now be open to tender by all recipient countries signaling a potential an end to the boomerang approach to our aid.

http://www.aidwatch.org.au/index.php?current=1&display=aw00631&display_item=2

(Added: Fri Dec 17 2004   Modified: Mon Aug 22 2005   Hits: 361)

Australian Aid: The Boomerang Approach (PDF 133.83 KB)

AidWatch briefing paper, 2004. Who are the big winners in the Australian aid program? This article suggests that Australian aid may be more interested in increasing the profits of Australian business than alleviating poverty for the world's poor.

http://www.aidwatch.org.au/assets/aw00617/CoA%20FACT%20SHEET.pdf

(Added: Fri Nov 05 2004   Modified: Tue Jul 19 2005   Hits: 456)

Benn to end link between aid and privatisation

The Guardian, Ashley Seager Wednesday March 2, 2005. Britain is to announce that it will no longer urge poor countries to privatise large swaths of industry or open their markets to foreign trade overnight as a condition for receiving development aid. The international development secretary, Hilary Benn, will announce the policy change at a high-level forum of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris today on aid effectiveness. He will not entirely remove conditions, as countries with high levels of corruption or human rights abuses will still struggle to receive British aid, but those with good governance and poverty reduction strategies will have much less trouble receiving money. John Hilary, director of campaigns and policy at the charity War on Want, said: "This is a welcome first step in delinking British aid from harmful policies such as privatisation and trade liberalisation. "The British government's support for such policies has always been incompatible with its stated commitment to poverty reduction." So-called "conditionality" has been widely criticised for increasing poverty among vulnerable groups in the developing world, and the credibility of the British aid programme has suffered as a result, say campaigners.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,5138487-103676,00.html

(Added: Mon Mar 07 2005   Modified: Tue Jul 19 2005   Hits: 148)

Britain releases development funds to World Bank

Britain said on Tuesday it would release a payment of 50 million pounds ($98.83 million) to the World Bank that it had threatened to withhold due to concerns over the bank's policies in the developing world. Britain had linked payment to the World Bank reforming the conditions it attaches to its aid and said in September it was considering not handing over the funds. But a World Bank report has since said it was moving away from making aid conditional on economic policy changes on developing countries. (Reuters, 5 December 2006)

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L05738856.htm

(Added: Thu Dec 07 2006   Hits: 165)

Challenging conditions: A new strategy for reform at the World Bank and IMF (pdf)

Nations must collectively respond to poverty, but the World Bank and IMF are failing to contribute to this goal because of deeply embedded conflicts of interest, their dominance by the world's richest countries and overlapping roles. One symptom of all this is their continued use of controversial economic policy conditions, such as liberalisation and privatisation, despite their claims to be supporting countries to make their own policy choices. Such conditions force governments to implement policies, even if they are unpopular with their citizens, have failed to achieve the significant gains in economic growth promised and have been shown to impoverish already poor communities. This 35-page report argues that the UK government should halt funding to the WB and IMF until comprehensive reform is acheived. (Christian Aid, July 2006)

http://www.christian-aid.org.uk/indepth/607ifis/challengingconditions.pdf

(Added: Thu Jul 20 2006   Hits: 190)

DAC Recommendation on Untying Official Development Assistance to the Least Developed Countries (PDF 39Kb)

OECD-DAC, 12-Apr-2001. Members of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC) agree to the objective of untying their bilateral official development assistance (ODA) to the Least Developed Countries as a means to: − foster co-ordinated, efficient and effective partnerships with developing countries; − strengthen the ownership and responsibility of partner countries in the development process; − demonstrate responsiveness to the requests from partner countries and others to increase the use of untied aid in order to promote aid effectiveness; and − contribute to broader efforts with partner countries to promote their integration into the global economy.

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/14/56/1885476.pdf

(Added: Mon Feb 07 2005   Modified: Tue Jul 19 2005   Hits: 90)

Development Aid for Development's Sake

Almost daily, the United States and Europe brandish threats to impose economic sanctions or cut off development assistance unless some vulnerable government accepts their political strictures. The most recent threats are towards the new Hamas-led government in Palestine. Other recent examples include threats vis-à-vis Chad, Ethiopia, Haiti, Kenya, Bolivia, Uganda, and long-standing sanctions against Myanmar. Such tactics are misguided. The use of development aid as a political stick merely deepens the suffering of impoverished and unstable countries, without producing the political objectives sought by donors. (Jeffrey Sachs, Project Syndicate, 2006)

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/sachs108

(Added: Thu Sep 21 2006   Hits: 121)

DEVELOPMENT: Aid "Dismally Slow" in Reaching Poorest

Developing countries have raised large numbers of their people above the international community's dollar-a-day poverty line but few of the "ultra poor" -- 162 million people living on less than 50 cents a day -- have benefited and in some regions their numbers have swollen ( IPS, 7 November 2007).

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39960

(Added: Fri Nov 09 2007   Hits: 184)

Does Debt Relief Increase Fiscal Space in Zambia?

This Country Study examines fiscal policy in Zambia, and how expenditure and taxation could be used to accelerate growth and reduce poverty. Since 1990, fiscal policy has been closely linked to debt servicing and constrained by external loan conditionalities. This inversion of social priorities has had a debilitating effect on growth, poverty reduction and combating the HIV/AIDS pandemic. It finds that due to associated policy conditionalities and other factors, HIPC debt relief will result in less fiscal space, rather than more. The Zambian government has little leeway to choose its own fiscal policies, despite donor rhetoric about 'national ownership' of poverty-reduction policies. (UNDP, September 2006)

http://www.undp-povertycentre.org/pub/IPCCountryStudy005.pdf

(Added: Tue Oct 03 2006   Modified: Mon Jul 02 2007   Hits: 189)

Dogmatic Development : Privatisation and conditionalities in six countries: a PSIRU report for War on Want.

by David Hall and Robin de la Motte. Public Services International Research Unit. February 2004. This report looks at how conditionalities and pressures from aid agencies and development banks force developing countries to adopt privatisation policies in public services. It focuses specifically on the sectors of water, electricity, and healthcare, in six countries: Colombia; El Salvador; Indonesia; Mozambique; South Africa; and Sri Lanka. It examines the impact of the requirements and policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB), and other agencies including regional development banks, the European Commission (EC) and donor countries. It includes a specific examination of the various ways in which the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) supports privatisation in these services. It concludes that the pressures for privatisation have been strengthened through new structures of 'globalised aid'; that they create serious limitations on independent decision-making by developing countries, and generate some strong political responses; and that policies of development banks and donor agencies, including DFID, should be reviewed to remove such pressures and ensure that policy-making in developing countries is determined by local democratic processes.

http://www.waronwant.org/?lid=7540&cc=1

(Added: Tue Feb 15 2005   Modified: Tue Jul 19 2005   Hits: 242)

Foreign Aid, Conditionality and Ghost of the Financing Gap: A Forgotten Aspect of the Aid Debate (PDF)

The World Bank publication "Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why generated a new wave of controversy about foreign aid and policy conditionality that had seen several decades of intense debate. Much of the recent debate has focused on the aid-growth relationship and the role of "good" policies. While a great deal has been said about qualitative aspects of aid-effectiveness (i.e. fungibility, among other things), little attention has been paid so far to some important quantitative aspects. The present study draws attention to this neglected aspect of the aid debate to demonstrate that the level of aid requirements of a country is an equally important and integral part of aid and aideffectiveness. The World Bank/IMF approaches to estimation of external assistance requirements of a country in quantitative terms is compared with an alternative model, the so-called "Balance of Payments Constrained Growth Model" (based on the Harrod trade multiplier). It is revealed that the latter is not a real alternative as it is an incomplete model. More importantly, it is shown that international financial institutions use these quantitative frameworks in a very flexible and pragmatic way to carry on a meaningful policy dialogue with both donors and recipient countries, which has an important bearing on aid-effectiveness. (PDF - 198kb)

http://econ.worldbank.org/files/25541_wps3019.pdf

(Added: Mon Nov 03 2003   Modified: Thu Aug 25 2005   Hits: 184)

G8 - Conditionalities undermine debt deal [PDF 37.33 Kb]

AIDWATCH, June 2005. The proposal by the G7 (soon to be ratified by the G8) on debt cancellation has focused the world's attention on the goal of ending severe poverty. Debt relief should undoubtedly be supported and is a clear recognition by Northern governments and institutions that their development policies have largely failed to address the key problem of poverty alleviation. Yet the G7 deal illustrates that there is still a great distance to go before there is a level playing field for the world's poorest people and the world's poorest countries. Further, the specifics of this debt relief package reveal several areas of concern and indicate business as usual on the part of donor nations.

http://www.aidwatch.org.au/assets/aw00732/G8%20jun%2005.pdf

(Added: Tue Jul 19 2005   Modified: Tue Jan 10 2006   Hits: 88)

Good Practice Principles for the Application of Conditionality: a progress report

In September 2006 the UK International Development Secretary, Hilary Benn, expressed concern that he had not yet seen evidence from the World Bank about how they were reducing the use of economic policy conditionality, and that he was considering withholding funding of £50 million. The World Bank responded with this report. The report shows that: the number of conditions and benchmarks used by the Bank has fallen the past year, since the principles were introduced, continuing a trend over the last few years; the World Bank is moving away from using conditions to impose economic policy choices on governments; and the Bank has made real efforts to make sure that the conditions it does use reflect the priorities of developing countries. In the light of the evidence of satisfactory progress shown by the World Bank report, the UK will release the £50 million payment that was dependent on this, and has asked for a further report in 12 months' time. (World Bank, 6 November 2006)

http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2006/12/05/000112742_20061205163248/Rendered/PDF/37977.pdf

(Added: Tue Jan 09 2007   Hits: 74)

Governance conditionality and the reform of multilateral development finance: the role of the group

By Carlos Santiso. While the World Bank has significantly stretched its policy frontiers by endorsing "good governance" as a core element of its development strategy and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has integrated concerns over poverty reduction in its lending operations and corporate policies, both institutions continue to rely on the same instruments of punitive conditionality to promote governance reform and institutional development. This paper thus sets out to examine the IFIs' efforts at strengthening good governance in developing countries and emerging markets. It focuses on the complex relationship between good governance and aid effectiveness and examines the World Bank's approach to governance reform. It argues that the quality of governance is ultimately attributable to its democratic content. Therefore, for the Bank to substantially improve good governance in borrowing countries and reinvent itself, it will need to explicitly address issues of power, politics and democracy. The Bank should abandon the belief deeply anchored in its bureaucratic ethos that governance work can be restricted to technocratic improvements, thereby circumventing political economy factors. The paper proposes a radical reform of the governance of multilateral development finance by shifting to an ex post form of incentive conditionality aimed at rewarding good performance and based on national ownership. (ABSTRACT)

http://www.g8.utoronto.ca/g7/governance/santiso2002-gov7.pdf

(Added: Tue Nov 05 2002   Modified: Thu Aug 25 2005   Hits: 191)

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