Designing Expenditure Policy Conditionality in IMF-Supported Programs

This gap-filling paper provides granular advice on how to design quantitative and structural conditionality of IMF-supported programs in six expenditure policy areas: social assistance, energy subsidies, pension spending, health spending, education spending, and wage bill management. Such granular advice is based on a stocktaking exercise: an analysis of 105 programs approved between 2002 and July 2021 containing c.a. 1400 conditions. Conditions are key to identify outcomes or actions seen as critical for program success or monitoring, and so are essential for financial support countries can receive from the Fund