Summary The global economic crisis will compel many countries to revise key economic policies, including their exchange rate regime. The International Monetary Fund will have significant influence on their choices, and has exhibited a bias against intermediate regimes. We examine the link...

IMF programmes have sought to balance economic adjustment and external financing in part by relying on catalysing capital inflows from other sources. This paper reviews the mechanisms by which catalysis is believed to operate, and the evidence pertaining to its existence. The conclusion is that...

It has frequently been assumed that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) plays an important catalysing role in mobilizing international capital for developing countries and countries in transition. The Fund has conventionally been depicted as a "gatekeeper" that unlocks financial flows from...

Particularly in the context of the Millennium Development Goals, there has been much discussion of the association between the International Monetary Fund and bilateral aid flows. What role should the Fund be playing in helping to achieve the MDGs? Some observers have suggested that the Fund...

In a 2005 article in this journal, Genberg poses the question of whether countries with IMF programs have “privileged access” to international capital markets. In attempting to answer this question, he cautions about reading too much into some of the recent literature. In this paper, we...

Does the involvement of the IMF and World Bank in developing countries and countries in transition help them to attract capital from other sources? Do the multilateral institutions exert a catalytic effect? While there is a strong body of opinion that claims that they do, the catalytic effect...

Increasing attention is being paid to political economy dimensions of the IMF's operations. However, up until now, the literature has lacked a systematic overview of how politics and economics interact in this context. This paper sets out to fill the gap. Its conceptual basis is that of the...

<heading format="display" id="h1" implicit="yes" level="1">Abstract</heading> Having had excess lending capacity at the beginning of 2008, by the end of the year International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending had increased and, in anticipation of a further increase in the demand for Fund assistance, arguments were being put forward for a substantial increase in IMF...

Recent theoretical and empirical research suggests that under certain conditions IMF agreements induce additional inflows of finance from private international capital markets. This article provides new empirical evidence on this catalytic effect using a treatment effects model to correct for...