The determinants of IMF fiscal conditionalities: economics or politics?

Conditionalites, measures that a borrowing country should adopt to obtain loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), are pervasive in IMF programs. This paper estimates the effects of political and economic factors on the number of conditions and on the size of fiscal adjustment requested in an agreement. As found in the literature, political proximity of the borrowing country to the Fund’s major shareholders has an important effect on the number of conditions. However, the magnitude of fiscal adjustment requested by the IMF is strongly affected by the size of a country’s fiscal deficit but not by political proximity. We also find a very small correlation between the number of conditions and the requested fiscal adjustment.