The Pattern of IMF Lending: An Analysis of Prediction Failures

In recent years, the International Monetary Fund has seen a spate of critical analyses of its lending activities. It has even been suggested that politics influences the allocation of IMF lending with powerful industrialized countries being able to use Fund lending to further their own ambitions. We ask simple questions? Why did some countries borrow from the Fund when our models predicted that they would not? Why did other countries not borrow when our models predicted that they would? We resort to qualitative analysis of the individual cases to see whether we can retrospectively and reasonably explain our prediction failures.