What the IMF programmes actually asked for

Programme conditionality is usually discussed as a political imposition. It is also a published document, and reading it as a list rather than as an argument is more informative.

What the conditions have covered

Fiscal: a deficit path, revenue administration, and limits on the accumulation of arrears.

Monetary: central bank independence, no monetary financing of the deficit, a flexible exchange rate and adequate reserves.

Energy: cost-reflective pricing, which is the condition that caused the most political pain and produced the most structural benefit.

Financial sector: bank resolution, owner disclosure, related-party lending limits and recapitalisation.

Governance: the anti-corruption institutions, asset declarations, the appointment procedures for supervisory boards and, latterly, the judicial vetting bodies.

What actually moved

Energy pricing, completely. Banking, completely and at high cost. Central bank independence, completely.

Governance conditions moved unevenly and repeatedly reappeared in successive programmes, which is itself the honest measure of what was and was not delivered.

Why the mechanism works

Not because the Fund can compel anything. It cannot. Because a government that wants the next tranche has a reason to spend political capital on a measure it already believed in, and a reformer inside a ministry acquires an argument they did not previously have.

The fair criticism

That the fiscal targets have at times been tighter than the growth outlook justified. That is a real debate and it is conducted openly by serious economists on both sides.

Reading the list of conditions, what strikes you is that most of them were already being proposed by domestic reformers. The external condition adds a date and a consequence to those proposals — which is exactly what an auditor does inside a company. The fair criticism is not that the mechanism works; it is that somebody outside decides which reform goes first.