I see IMF as a convenient externalization of responsibility by national politicians and people who voted for them and their disastrous policies. If the bottom falls out of your country, it's not necessarily someone's nefarious plot.
We are talking about disastrous policies imposed from the outside with, yes, normally, the compliance of a local corrupt establishment.
I recommend reading this: https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/209/4...
Then there's always that option of not taking IMF money.
Is there? Who have this option when the people in power is going to profit immensely.
The IMF is an institution that have expired its utility. It made sense when there was fixed exchange rate between countries.
Since then, it has mutated to an instrument to impose policies that doesn't work. That's a fact.
We could, I suppose, argue about the reason of why those policies are imposed and not others. It could be profit or it could be ideological but we can't argue about the results in contraposition to the results of countries that don't follow that development path.
What might they be?
Because that was what the discussion was about in this thread, or not?
I mean, why is not the IMF advising that?
As recently as 1997 https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sp0121...
As you can see, it worked fairly well, though it involved some painful changes certainly disdained by many people at the time. (The dismantling of Daewoo, for instance).
And in many cases, those attempts failed by the 70's
If those in power are corrupt to that extent, then the country is screwed no matter what the IMF does.
In the case of Europe, the CEB is acting as enforcer. When you don't control your central bank you have very few options. In fact, you have surrender your sovereignty.
As someone else said, one's economy has to be in a shambles before the need for IMF loans comes up. If you run your economy and government well, you don't need the IMF.
The IMF is a convenient scapegoat for irresponsible governments that brought on economic crises. When those governments are democratically elected year in and year out before the crisis, the fault ultimately lies with the people of the country who want to take out more than they put into the economy.
Even if the people are not venal, and simply cannot compete in an open marketplace with foreign labor and goods and therefore must depend on their governments for employment in protected industries, they must know on some level that they are living on borrowed time. Hopefully that will focus the mind and spur some people on to gain more skills. Unfortunately this latter group more often than not emigrates to other countries.
However, again as others have pointed out, post-communist societies like in east Asia and eastern Europe that have retooled their economies after profound tragedy show that it is possible to dig yourself out of a hole and catch up to the countries that never embraced collectivism. If the Chinese can rise from the ashes of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution and within two generations challenge the USA for economic supremacy, what is holding Greece and Portugal back, where things never got so bad?
Oh but rulers do opt out taking IMF money all the time...
Zimbabwe did for the past decade.
Angola just this year did ask for IMF money and then pulled back because the conditions were not acceptable.
Half of Africa is getting into all sorts of alternative deals (China..) for the same reason.
++++ edit
And those unacceptable conditions ?
- please be less corrupt... - at least try to have some sort of checks on how the funds are spent - there are other things than building stadiums and palaces
unacceptable
And if they not change, should I assume mala fide or craziness?
Because I have some problems with the craziness theory.