Unhealthy conditions: IMF loan conditionality and its impact on health financing
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) practice of attaching policy conditions to its loans for crisis-hit countries continues to trigger outrage and protest. This report investigates the conditions attached to the IMF loans for 26 country programmes that were approved in 2016 and 2017.
In at least 20 of those countries, people have gone on strike or taken to the streets to protest against government cutbacks, the rising cost of living, tax restructuring and wage bill reforms pushed by IMF conditionality. They have good reasons to complain.
This new Eurodad study on IMF conditionality assesses first how intrusive IMF programmes are. We found that the number of IMF conditions is increasing, a finding that stands in stark contrast to IMF’s own stated intentions of streamlining conditionality, and focusing on macro-critical conditionality.