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The Currency of Confidence: How Economic Beliefs Shape the IMF’s Relationship with Its Borrowers

Online ISBN:
9781501708305
Print ISBN:
9781501705120
Publisher:
Cornell University Press
Book

The Currency of Confidence: How Economic Beliefs Shape the IMF’s Relationship with Its Borrowers

Stephen C. Nelson
Stephen C. Nelson
Northwestern University
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Published online:
21 September 2017
Published in print:
1 February 2017
Online ISBN:
9781501708305
Print ISBN:
9781501705120
Publisher:
Cornell University Press

Abstract

This book suggests that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a purposive actor in world politics, primarily driven by a set of homogenous economic ideas, with professional staff who emerged from an insular set of American-trained economists. The IMF treats countries differently depending on whether that staff trusts the country's top officials; that trust in turn depends on the educational credentials of the policy team that Fund officials face across the negotiating table. Intellectual differences thus lead to lasting economic effects for the citizens of countries seeking IMF support. Based on deep archival research in IMF archives and personnel files, the book argues that the IMF has been the Johnny Appleseed of neoliberalism: neoliberal policymakers sprout and take root in countries that have spent recent decades living under the Fund's conditional lending arrangements. The book's argument is supported through quantitative measures and illustrates the dynamics of relations between the Fund and client countries in a detailed examination of newly available archives of four periods in Argentina's long and often bitter relations with the IMF.

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