Do the Authorities Want the IMF to Contribute to the Development of Policy Frameworks?
Do the Authorities Want the Fund to Present Analysis and Assessments of Their Economies to Other Countries, Donors, or Financial Markets?
Is the Fund Inflexible, Unwilling to Innovate, and Closed to New Approaches? Has Staff Willingness to Consider Different Approaches Improved?
Surveyed Authorities' Views on IMF Outreach: Do They Want More, Less, or About the Same with Each Group?
Did Fund Staff Treat Other Countries Better or Worse Than PRGF-Eligible Countries?
Fund Interlocutors: Who Is More Effective? Who Is Less?
1. This paper examines IMF interactions in PRGF-eligible countries. It focuses on interactions with the authorities on surveillance, programs and signaling, and technical assistance during the 2001–08 evaluation period. Like the other country papers, it considers the extent to which interactions were effective and well managed. Like them, it considers interactions with country stakeholders beyond the authorities, especially as they affected the primary relationship with the authorities.
2. The paper finds that IMF interactions with PRGF-eligible countries were more effective than with any other country group. This greater effectiveness reflects an institutional strategy for PRGF-eligible countries replete with attractive financing, debt relief, strong links to donor funding, and competent technical assistance, which in turn made for an abundance of traction in interactions with the authorities during the evaluation period. But in some cases it also led to what authorities perceived to be arrogant and inflexible staff behavior—especially in the first half of the evaluation period and especially at times of program interruptions and delays. There were fewer complaints, and more praise, from countries without such interruptions. Though authorities have reported progress in recent years across a number of dimensions, reputational damage from the earlier period remains, including with many stakeholders beyond the authorities, who continue to define the Fund in terms of structural adjustment, privatization, and fiscal austerity, despite increased staff outreach. The paper finds progress in several areas during the latter part of the evaluation period.
3. The evidence and analysis that leads to these conclusions are developed in the remainder of this paper, which is structured as follows. This first chapter profiles the PRGF-eligible countries and the evidence on which the paper is based, and summarizes the policy guidance governing interactions during the evaluation period. Chapter II discusses interactions with the authorities, examining in turn the evaluation evidence on interactions on surveillance, programs and signaling, and capacity building. Chapter III discusses interactions with other in-country stakeholders beyond the authorities. Chapter IV discusses the management of interactions with the PRGF-eligible countries, taking up in more detail issues of strategy, style, and relationship-management. Chapter V concludes.
4. The evaluation covers IMF interactions with 77 countries eligible for borrowing from the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF).1 These 77 countries, listed in Annex 1, had a combined GDP of $1.3 trillion in 2008, amounting to under 2 percent of global GDP measured with current exchange rates.
5. These countries form a diverse group. Some are very small (Kiribati's population is less than 100,000) and some are very large (Nigeria's population exceeds 150 million). Per capita incomes vary widely (from a low of $140 in Burundi to a high of $5,710 in Grenada).2 And the economic and financial challenges they face are equally varied. Some are just emerging from conflict status and others are poised to join the ranks of the emerging economies. But each faces macroeconomic policy challenges and related institutional capacity constraints that the Fund has both the mandate and expertise to help address. Almost all enjoyed macroeconomic progress over much of the evaluation period. Ninety-eight percent (all except Somalia) had Article IV relationships, 95 percent had technical assistance programs, and 75 percent had a program with the Fund at some time during the evaluation period.
6. IMF interactions with PRGF-eligible countries are managed by all five area departments. As shown in Figure 1, almost half of them are covered by the IMF's African Department (AFR), with most of the remainder covered by the Asia and Pacific (APD), Middle East and Central Asia (MCD), and Western Hemisphere (WHD) departments. Just two countries are covered by the IMF's European Department (EUR).
7. The evaluation sample consisted of 16 countries—Armenia, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ghana, Guinea, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal, Solomon Islands, Togo, Uganda, and Vietnam. All 16 had regular Article IV consultations during the evaluation period. Fifteen had programs at some time during the evaluation period; the exception is the Solomon Islands. Its inclusion in the evaluation sample is meant to shed light on the nature of IMF interactions with small states, which account for the majority of the "nonprogram" countries among the 77.3 All 16 sample countries were extensive users of Fund technical assistance. All the sample countries except the Solomon Islands had resident representatives, some of whom were shared with other countries—Senegal and The Gambia, for example, shared a resident representative, as did Benin and Togo.
8. Sources of evidence for this paper include survey, documentary, and interview data developed specifically for the evaluation, as well as relevant data developed for earlier evaluations.4 Highlights of the evidence base follow, with greater detail provided in the companion background technical documents.
The evaluation's survey evidence covers the authorities and civil society organizations (CSOs) in PRGF-eligible countries, and IMF staff working on these countries. The evaluation survey of country authorities was answered by 47 respondents from 41 PRGF-eligible countries, for an overall country response rate of 54 percent.5 Responses to the staff survey totaled 290, covering work on 69 PRGF-eligible countries (containing some 88 percent of the total PRGF-eligible country population). The civil society survey received 259 responses from civil society representatives in 61 of the 77 PRGF-eligible countries. The methodology and results are set out in detail in the background technical document on the survey.
The evaluation team reviewed the Fund's internal documentary record for the 16 countries in the evaluation sample. The material included confidential briefing memoranda to IMF management, mission back-to-office reports, and interdepartmental correspondence on related country issues. Such material gave the IEO a window into internal debates about staff positions on particular issues, if or how IMF management may have contributed on an issue, and how country views influenced the debate and the decisions.
Country visits by the evaluation team to Cameroon, Senegal, and Togo provided opportunities for in-depth interviews with a broad representation of authorities in these countries, as well as for discussions with partners and stakeholders. Also, taking advantage of the IMF Spring and Annual Meetings in Washington—and the telephone—the evaluation team interviewed from headquarters many representatives of the authorities and Fund staff—including resident representatives—(and some World Bank staff) who worked on the evaluation sample countries. The interview methodology and results are set out in the background technical document on the interviews.
9. The Fund's evolving approach to interactions with PRGF-eligible countries is catalogued in a series of papers for the Executive Board, the most recent of which is the staff paper on "The Role of the Fund in Low-Income Countries" (IMF, 2008a), which the Board discussed in July 2008. According to that paper, the Fund provides: (i) advice on macroeconomic policies and institutions that support internal and external macroeconomic stability, foster economic growth, and enhance integration in the international trade and financial system; (ii) assistance in building capacity and institutions for sound macroeconomic management and financial stability; and (iii) concessional balance of payments support.
Surveillance. Interactions were governed by the 1977 Surveillance Decision, replaced by the 2007 Surveillance Decision, with specific guidance to staff provided in a series of surveillance guidance notes.8 These notes instructed staff to engage in a frank policy dialogue that supports members' receptiveness to Fund advice. The dialogue should include cross-country comparative studies as a way to add value to policy discussions and, more generally, consultations should attempt to bring to bear other countries' experiences in addressing similar problems, drawing out policy implications. Spillover effects to and from other countries were to be discussed wherever relevant. Priority is to be given to macroeconomic issues related to external sustainability, vulnerability to balance of payments or currency crises, sustainable growth with price stability, and the systemic or regional impact of policies in large economies. Financial sector issues were to receive thorough coverage. And bilateral surveillance should be informed by multilateral and regional surveillance.
Lending to member countries has entailed conditions from the beginning. In 2000, the Fund concluded a review of conditionality that recognized that successful economic policy programs must be founded on strong country ownership. Guidelines on conditionality adopted by the Board in September 2002 re-emphasized the importance of ownership and called for "parsimony" and "criticality" in the use of conditions. The Executive Board reviewed the application of the new guidelines in March 2005 and in July 2008 a revision to the operational guidance note on conditionality was prepared as an aid for staff to the implementation of the 2002 guidelines. Recently, the Fund revised its conditionality framework in the context of an extensive reform to improve its capacity to prevent and resolve crises. For the PRGF, ESF and PSI, loan conditionalities were evaluated as part of the general streamlining of Fund conditionality, shifting to a review-based approach to assessment of program performance rather than through the use of structural performance criteria.
12. This chapter examines the evidence on the effectiveness of IMF interactions with the authorities of PRGF-eligible countries. It begins with a brief discussion of the overall picture emerging from the survey results, and what it says about IMF interactions with PRGF-eligible countries compared with the other country groups. It then turns to the evaluation evidence on surveillance, programs, and capacity building. A theme running through the discussion is the value most authorities of PRGF-eligible countries placed on the Fund's products and services in addressing the challenges they faced. How this value affected substantive interactions between the authorities and staff is discussed in this chapter. The implications for the style of interactions are discussed in Chapter IV.
1Inverted scale. The average absolute percentage point difference across the 10 purposes between how much the authorities wanted the IMF to fulfill each purpose and how much staff aimed to do so ("a fair amount" or "very much").
14. Figures 3–5 illustrate the data underlying several of the indicators set out in Figure 2—those for role relevance, role effectiveness, and strategic alignment. The data cover survey questions put to both the authorities of PRGF-eligible countries and to the staff working on them about the relevance and effectiveness of ten possible IMF roles.
1Includes only those who responded that their country had an IMF financial or monitoring program.
2Includes only those who responded that their country received IMF technical assistance or training.
As discussed in the main report, all country groups (including the PRGF-eligible countries) expressed strong interest in the Fund's assessment of their countries' policies and prospects and in a good exchange of views. Where the responses from the PRGF-eligible countries diverge from the others is in their wider interest in Fund interactions. As shown, at least 80 percent of PRGF-eligible survey respondents said they wanted Fund interactions on five roles—as illustrated in Figure 3—the two just mentioned, plus three others: (i) contributing to the development of policy frameworks; (ii) assisting in the development of capacity; and (iii) presenting analysis and assessments of the country's economy to other countries, donors, or financial markets. Majorities of PRGF-eligible authorities wanted nine out of the ten possible Fund roles.
Also as shown in Figure 4, at least 70 percent of the surveyed PRGF-eligible authorities rated interactions on 7 of the 10 queried roles as effective or very effective. For other country groups, only two roles were that highly rated. The three exceptions that received subpar ratings from the PRGF-eligible countries are the Fund's contribution to (i) international policy coordination, including through the analysis of spillovers; (ii) the development and maintenance of policy consensus inside government; and (iii) the development and maintenance of policy consensus outside government. And even these three roles received higher effectiveness ratings from the PRGF-eligible countries than from any other country group.
Figure 5 contains the data for the indicator of strategic alignment, which measures by how much the authorities of the different countries and the staff working on them expressed a shared view about the purposes and priorities of their interactions. The strategic alignment indicator for the PRGF-eligible countries reflects the fact that on average, across the ten purposes queried in the evaluation survey, the authorities' and staff ratings differed by an average of 9 percentage points, compared with 16–25 percentage points elsewhere. Strategic alignment in the context of PRGF-eligible countries is discussed further in Chapter IV.
17. The remainder of this chapter looks at interactions between the authorities and staff in the context of surveillance, programs, and capacity building, drawing on the evaluation's more detailed survey, interview, and documentary evidence. The discussion details the positives and the negatives, on balance painting a positive picture of interactions during the evaluation period, and especially during the last two years—while acknowledging difficult interactions with several individual countries related to program delays and interruptions in the 2002–04 period.
18. The evidence suggests that PRGF-eligible countries held mainstream views with respect to the purposes and effectiveness of surveillance processes. Figure 2, for example, shows that two purposes queried in the evaluation survey that are associated with surveillance and other Fund activities (provide a clear and objective assessment of the economy's policies and prospects and contribute to a good exchange of views) received the highest scores from the authorities of PRGF-eligible countries for relevance and for effectiveness. These are also the two highest rated items for all other country groups. The ratings provided by IMF staff working on PRGF-eligible countries were broadly the same as those of the authorities. The authorities rated the performance of staff carrying out surveillance activities highly, though slightly lower than that of staff working on programs and technical assistance, as discussed later in the paper.
(i) international coordination of policies, including the analysis of spillovers; (ii) timely alerts about changing external conditions; and (iii) cross-country analysis of other countries' experiences. Figure 7 shows that these also were problems for the PRGF-eligible countries, albeit not to the same degree as for the other country groups, especially in the Fund's bringing quickly to their attention the implications of changing external conditions. Based on the evaluation interviews, this reflects the Fund's quick response to the food and fuel crises of 2007–08, which the authorities found helpful in the dialogue and in the Fund's action in September 2008 to revise the Exogenous Shocks Facility to make it easier to access. This said, in interviews with government officials, the private sector, and civil society in PRGF-eligible countries, concerns surfaced about what some saw as a double standard in dealing with the then unfolding global crisis, as the Fund was seen to be actively promoting bailouts, government takeovers, and fiscal stimulus packages in advanced economies, which they saw as very different from the medicine prescribed for developing countries.
20. Interviews with PRGF-eligible country officials and staff indicated that a country's program status affected how surveillance was perceived. Officials of one nonprogram country said that they had found Article IV missions valuable for dialogue and periodic evaluation of policies and processes, although staff felt less satisfied with the progress the surveillance policy dialogue made in getting action. While officials in another country, which had experienced a prolonged interruption of program status and engagement with donors, said that they had found the surveillance to be constructive and helpful to them in preventing a further deterioration of policies and prospects. But not all feedback was positive, with one finance minister echoing what several officials from emerging economies said about surveillance—that it seldom came up with anything new. Meanwhile, for many program countries, it was often hard to distinguish the end of Article IV consultations from the beginning of negotiations, and staff reports provided to the Board often blurred positions as well.17 Officials from one country with a Policy Support Instrument (PSI) relationship highlighted the close interlinkages they saw with the surveillance process.
21. Much more than the other country groups, the PRGF-eligible countries wanted the Fund to contribute to the development of policy frameworks. As shown in Figure 8, the authorities of almost all PRGF-eligible countries wanted IMF policy advice; while three-quarters said the Fund was effective or very effective at it. As the figure illustrates, these numbers were very different for the other country groups, where a small majority of other advanced economies and a larger majority from other emerging economies wanted the Fund to contribute.
Figure 8.Do the Authorities Want the IMF to Contribute to the Development of Policy Frameworks?
22. Of all Fund interactions, those surrounding programs are the most sensitive. As shown in Figure 9, almost 80 percent of official survey respondents from PRGF-eligible countries said they wanted financial and/or monitoring support from the Fund during the 2007–08 period, 81 percent of those receiving such support saying that it was effective or very effective, with the remainder mostly saying interactions in the context of delivery was "average." In most years of the evaluation period, 40–45 PRGF-eligible countries had programs, with a total of 60 having programs at one time or another over the period. Box 1 briefly summarizes the experiences of the 15 case study countries with program relationships during the evaluation period.
2Shows the share of authorities who responded "effective" or "very effective." Includes only those who responded that their country had an IMF financial or monitoring program.
23. Many of these programs also entailed signaling activities by the Fund—to other countries, donors, and financial markets about country policies and prospects—which added greatly to the financial stakes involved in a country's securing the Fund's blessing for its policies and prospects. As shown in Figure 10, this is a service that many PRGF-eligible countries wanted and thought the Fund performed well. And in interviews, officials were full of praise for Fund performance in this area. Officials from two countries expressed deep appreciation for the Fund's help with the Paris Club. Officials from a third said the Fund had been extremely helpful in securing resumption of donor support and resolving arrears to World Bank. An official from a fourth country said that his authorities considered the Fund to have played a unique role relative to other organizations. Another said that this was an area of particularly successful interactions.
Figure 10.Do the Authorities Want the Fund to Present Analysis and Assessments of Their Economies to Other Countries, Donors, or Financial Markets?
24. The bottom line is that most authorities and staff believe that during the evaluation period, the Fund added value in PRGF-eligible countries through financial and monitoring programs, debt relief, and donor signaling. However, there are differences of view across countries, depending on their own their particular experience with the Fund. This "suite" of products and services brought to those countries which could access them substantial financial benefits, direct and indirect, securely anchoring the Fund's role with this group of countries during the evaluation period. The result was an abundance of traction in Fund interactions—in contrast to the situation in the surveillance-only advanced and emerging economies discussed in the main report and in the other country papers. But this abundance of traction was also seen to put staff in a position of power vis-à-vis the authorities, as several ministers of finance from Sub-Saharan African countries observed. In turn, different PRGF-eligible countries saw the playing out of this power imbalance differently depending on their own country situations, as discussed below.
The interviews and document reviews for the 15 evaluation sample countries with programs during the evaluation period revealed different kinds of country situations and, in turn, interactions with the Fund during the program process.
Some of the countries (such as Armenia, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Uganda) broadly met their macroeconomic goals over the period, with the Fund making a contribution in each case, whether to the reform process, debt relief, and/or the Paris Club process.
Others (such as Cameroon, Ghana, Malawi, and Senegal) achieved important progress, albeit with significant program interruptions in the 2002–04 period and controversy—and occasional acrimony—in their interactions with the Fund.
In a third group of countries (the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guinea, and Togo), underlying governance issues were present throughout much of the evaluation period and progress is both recent and fragile, with the HIPC Completion Point not reached.
Finally, in two others (Bolivia and Vietnam), macroeconomic performance was strong throughout most of the evaluation period, but PRGFs were interrupted early on by other conditionality issues. Neither of these countries needed the Fund's financial support, and the Fund lost influence in both: in one because of a change in government and the Fund's identification with the heavily market-oriented policies of the predecessor government, and in the other as the World Bank and other budget support donors and providers of technical assistance became more closely involved.
25. The authorities of some PRGF-eligible countries saw the resulting imbalance of power, coupled with what they saw as a rigid intellectual paradigm, as leading to demanding and inflexible conditionality to which the authorities had to agree or else.
For several interviewed authorities, "inflexibility" was a lightning rod for bitter complaints about Fund interactions, many of which related to major program interruptions and/or delays in the delivery of debt relief. They complained about what they saw as inappropriate inflexibility by the Fund in program negotiations and reviews. Several said that in their experience PRGF conditionality had been calibrated too tightly, too inflexibly, and with too much ambition in light of domestic political considerations and capacity constraints.
Some current and former area department mission chiefs broadly shared this perspective, complaining that the review system forced them to spend valuable time refuting central reviewers' points, both large and small. But other current and former area department mission chiefs felt that the briefing paper and the associated review process were essential for ensuring evenhandedness across countries and conformity with Fund policies and Board guidance.
26. For the authorities of other PRGF-eligible countries, the Fund's power was also recognized, but on balance seen as helpful to their interests whether in dealing with the Paris Club, other creditors, or donors or in disciplining spending ministries and other policy interests at home. They accordingly saw flexibility somewhat differently.
Some authorities said that they had found the Fund to be sufficiently flexible—or, in some cases, inflexible but helpfully so—on matters of conditionality. Ministry of finance officials from two countries saw the Fund's famous strictness on conditionality as a way to reinforce spending discipline with their colleagues in spending and other ministries.
One former minister of finance said that the Fund in the end proved to be quite flexible. But that it had taken a lot of pushing from staff and the authorities, and lobbying from their supporters among powerful shareholders, to get management to move to where the authorities wanted the Fund to go.
Yet others said that flexibility had simply not been a problem for them. They debated policies and conditions amicably and professionally with the team, back and forth, and in the end all agreed.
Several interviewed authorities also pointed to the Policy Support Instrument (PSI) as an important innovation that put them more squarely in the driver's seat and was more conducive to country ownership than previous Fund approaches. Officials of one country said that they felt more in charge with the PSI and that that had made an important difference to their interactions with the staff, while an official from another PSI country said his authorities considered the PSI relationship to have been successful from all angles.
27. The evaluation evidence suggests that the time dimension is critical to the debate about flexibility. The survey evidence illustrated in Figure 11 shows that 30–40 percent of PRGF-eligible respondents said that Fund policies and procedures were inflexible and that the staff was insufficiently willing to innovate. But 51 percent said the staff's willingness to consider different approaches had improved over the past two years, suggesting ipso facto a worse situation before. Meanwhile, most of the specific complaints raised in the evaluation interviews dated from the 2002–04 period. In almost all cases, interviewed officials—even from those who complained most bitterly about program interruptions—said that the Fund had changed and was now more reasonable and flexible. Or at least as flexible as they needed; indeed some said they did not want the Fund to be "too flexible" as it would diminish the value of its endorsement, something that they saw as especially important for signaling to donors. Several interviewees highlighted the way the Fund had handled the 2007–08 rise in oil and food prices on world markets and its support for "smart subsidies" targeted to the most affected and with built-in exit strategies.
Figure 11.Is the Fund Inflexible, Unwilling to Innovate, and Closed to New Approaches? Has Staff Willingness to Consider Different Approaches Improved?
28. Capacity building grew rapidly during the evaluation period, much of it targeted to PRGF-eligible countries. In the survey, 95 percent of respondents said they wanted the Fund to help build capacity and 80 percent said the Fund did a good job in this role. As illustrated in Figure 12, these numbers are much higher than for other country groups, even for the other emerging economies, which also are major users of technical assistance. All respondents said that they saw technical assistance as in their country's interest, and most officials said they wanted more. They rated the staff delivering technical assistance as second only to resident representatives in effectiveness. Interviewed officials from finance ministries praised the Fund's technical assistance generally, and specifically technical assistance for public finance and its providers, including those from Regional Technical Assistance Centers (RTACs), for which the Fund endeavors to use resident advisors from the region. Closely related, the desire for greater use of local experts where available also arose in the interviews with authorities and in the surveys. Former central bank governors praised the Fund's technical assistance on payments systems, inter alia.
2Shows the share of authorities who responded "effective" or "very effective." Includes only those who responded that their country received IMF technical assistance or training.
29. But some interviewed officials, noting the very large quantities of IMF technical assistance that had been provided, questioned its results in terms of sustained improvements in local capacity. This raises an issue about the programming of technical assistance and how it relates to the country's and Fund's medium-term vision, and in turn how the strategy for technical assistance reflects country track records in following through on past assistance. The documentary evidence reviewed for the evaluation suggests that the links between Fund technical assistance programs and country priorities improved over the evaluation period, but still remained relatively weak—with the most recent round of reforms designed to improve the prioritization of TA in line with the strategic objectives of both recipient countries and the Fund only recently adopted.22 The Regional Strategy Notes (RSNs) on technical assistance that were launched during the evaluation period contain some forward-looking country information, but minimal detail and links to other work of the Fund and donors. Similarly, the surveillance agendas, introduced in 2006 as a short-hand strategy brief, typically listed elements of the planned technical assistance program, but did not make clear how the programmed items fit into the overall agenda. Interviewed area department mission chiefs said they signed off on Fund technical assistance activities, basically on behalf of the authorities, with a view to vetoing activities that the authorities did not want. But they also said that practice varied on how proactive a role they and the authorities played in the identification and design of the technical assistance program.
30. This chapter looks at IMF interactions with stakeholders beyond the authorities. It examines recent developments in such interactions, and constraints on their effectiveness. It finds that an increasing amount of outreach took place to parliamentarians, civil society, the media, and market participants during the evaluation period. It also finds greater interest among the authorities of PRGF-eligible countries for such outreach than in most other country groups. However, sensitivities remain, especially with respect to civil society and the media, where painful memories of the structural adjustment era continue to define the Fund's image and undermine its effectiveness, in some cases making association with the IMF a political liability for the authorities and their ideas.
31. In PRGF-eligible countries, the Fund has been making an attempt to increase its efforts to outreach to a broader group of stakeholders, including parliamentarians, civil society organizations, the media, and market participants.
32. Interactions with parliamentarians in PRGF-eligible countries have focused particularly on issues related to parliamentary oversight for public financial management. Staff organized country and regional seminars for legislators, for example, in the Kyrgyz Republic in June 2006, and in Liberia and Tanzania in 2008. Other interactions with parliamentarians of PRGF-eligible countries took place through seminars, meetings with visiting groups of parliamentarians at IMF headquarters, and management speeches to members of parliaments, often under the aegis of the Parliamentary Network of the World Bank.
34. At the request of the IEO, Jan Aart Scholte carried out an intensive review of IMF outreach to CSOs, building on earlier work that he had done, including drafting the IMF's guidance to staff on outreach to civil society.26 His research for the IEO generally corroborated the earlier IEO finding of "limited and ineffective" outreach by Fund staff with civil society, based on his more intensive engagement with civil society representatives, while also noting evidence of increased outreach in evaluation sample countries such as Malawi and Mozambique.27 This research also found that a number of civil society organizations felt that the Fund was not being tough enough on fiscal transparency, a topic of widespread concern to civil society in many PRGF-eligible countries. This finding was echoed in the evaluation team's own meetings with civil society representatives in Cameroon, Senegal, and Togo, discussed below.
35. Survey evidence gathered by the Fund's External Relations Department (EXR) on staff outreach with trade unions is also germane. EXR survey showed that about half the staff teams working on PRGF-eligible countries had met at least annually with trade unions in the two years preceding the 2007 survey. Of the staff respondents who had held such meetings, about half said that the meetings had "influenced Fund policy advice in the country." Staff notes suggest that the influence was at a very general level, such as reminding staff of how important labor market flexibility or pension reform was, or educating staff about how trade unions and other stakeholders viewed the Fund and/or the country's policy challenges and agenda. But the meetings do seem to have played a useful role in informing Fund staff and local trade union representatives about each other's activities and priorities.
36. As in the other country groups, organized outreach to the media in PRGF-eligible countries has focused on the dissemination of the Fund's Regional Economic Outlooks (REOs). During the evaluation period, AFR produced eleven REOs, beginning in June 2003. Since 2005, REO launch has included road show presentations in English and French, for example, in Ghana and Senegal in 2007. Other area departments' REO disseminations to PRGF-eligible countries were more limited.
37. Most internal IMF documents reviewed by the evaluation team say little about outreach. Many staff back-to-office reports and most staff reports mention meetings with one or more CSOs, or the media, or private sector representatives, but they provide scant detail. Of course, page limits and word counts are fiercely guarded in the Fund, and routine meetings naturally receive limited coverage, leaving more space for recording the policy dialogue with the authorities. Board documents for the period, whether associated with programs or surveillance in the PRGF-eligible evaluation sample, are similarly brief on the subject. The surveillance agendas said relatively more, and included the Fund's country outreach strategy as one of their four main topics. However, in practice even they tended to list the plans, rather than providing an outreach strategy or explaining how strategy linked the planned actions to possible results—although in fairness to staff there was, in the main, a two-page limit for the entire agenda.
39. Staff survey responses, too, provide evidence on constraints, highlighting three key issues: risk aversion, training, and resources.
Risk aversion among staff is understandable; about 40 percent of mission chiefs and resident representatives working on PRGF-eligible countries said that management would not support them when tensions arose with the authorities. And about 20 percent of staff said that management would not support them if tensions arose with other stakeholders.
As regards training in the skills needed for effective outreach, what is relevant is how Fund staff learn. On-the-job experience, advice from IMF area departments and PDR, and feedback from the authorities were the prime sources from which mission chiefs and resident representatives working on PRGF-eligible countries said they acquired skills for undertaking outreach. EXR was not generally seen as a major source of advice, except for training in interacting with the media. Indeed, the EXR website and the CSO guide got the two lowest rankings of all the learning vehicles that IMF staff queried.
Third, staff perceive a tight resource constraint, notwithstanding underruns in the Fund's administrative budget over the period. One interviewed resident representative told the evaluation team that there were things that the department wanted the resident representative to do more of, such as outreach, but with budgetary cutbacks this was not possible. Even without cutbacks, IMF resident representatives' resources were stretched, as the evaluation team on Sub-Saharan Africa saw firsthand in 2006, and also on its more recent visits to Cameroon, Senegal, and Togo.
40. The power of each of these three constraints on interactions is affected by the country context, and especially by the degree of negativity felt towards the Fund because of its past association with structural adjustment and privatization. As noted in Box 2, the reputational legacy of structural adjustment, the CFA franc devaluation, and privatization looms large in much of West Africa. But in many PRGF-eligible countries, popular interest in fiscal transparency—a core Fund mandate—is even larger and, as the Senegal experience shows, can provide a basis for repositioning the Fund around a positive message. Of course repositioning needs also to be able to deal with the past, with staff equipped with (i) the facts and figures needed to show what the Fund did in the past and how and why it may have been right or wrong and what it has done to change, and (ii) critically important, the authorization from headquarters to speak about the past, and in what terms especially in admitting institutional mistakes.
Three case studies, drawn from IEO staff country visits to Cameroon, Togo, and Senegal, provide an interesting perspective on IMF outreach. In each country, IEO staff met with representatives of civil society, asking about the frequency of meetings with the IMF, the seriousness of the engagement, perceptions of changes in the Fund's approach over time, and their overall perceptions. In each, the questions about the evolution over time evoked strong negative reactions about the Fund's perceived role in structural adjustment in the 1980s and the CFA franc devaluation in the 1990s—but beyond this common ground the responses were very different in the three countries.
In Yaoundé, civil society representatives were generally angry with the IMF. They blamed the IMF for Cameroon's problems—highlighting privatization problems and the squeezing of social expenditures, inter alia—attributing to the IMF the motive of wanting to keep Cameroon poor. They said that IMF missions "met" with them on occasion, but did not seriously engage.
In Lomé, civil society representatives had a more favorable view of the IMF, which was widely seen to have played a positive role in brokering the resumption of donor involvement in Togo and the clearance of arrears to the World Bank and others. They said that they met with IMF missions, and that the missions seemed to listen to them. But some cautioned that the Fund should not be too soft on governance issues—it was essential that the IMF be a ruthless truth-teller on these critical fiduciary issues.
In Dakar, civil society representatives praised the Fund for the very constructive role they perceived that the institution had played in government transparency and in alerting the population to serious risks and problems with the current program, including on governance-related fiduciary issues.
41. Reflecting the above, the evaluation survey asked the authorities whether they wanted more, less, or about the same amount of outreach with a variety of groups going forward. The surveyed authorities were fairly evenly divided on how much of a role they wanted the Fund to play in outreach aimed at securing consensus on policies. Nearly half said they wanted the Fund to do at least the same amount of outreach as at present, and 40 percent saw the Fund's efforts to do so as effective or very effective. Very few wanted less outreach than at present. Indeed, 61 percent said they wanted the Fund to engage more in a wide discussion of policies (including through public seminars or meetings) and 30 percent wanted the same amount of engagement. Many PRGF authorities also were open to more outreach to specific groups. The upper panel of Figure 13 shows that 59 percent of the authorities wanted the Fund to increase its outreach to parliamentarians, 46 percent to market participants, 43 to civil society organizations, and 33 percent to the media.
Figure 13.Surveyed Authorities' Views on IMF Outreach: Do They Want More, Less, or About the Same with Each Group?
2Shows the share of authorities who responded that they would have wanted the IMF to engage "somewhat more" or "much more" with each group.
42. The lower panel of Figure 13 suggests that the authorities of the PRGF-eligible countries were more interested in expanded IMF outreach than any other country group/subgroup. This is an important point: while Figure 3's overall numbers for helping build and maintain consensus outside government are the lowest of all queried roles, they are higher in the PRGF-eligible countries than in the other countries. And more generally, the authorities of the PRGF-eligible countries are looking to Fund staff to help educate the public on economic and financial issues, as part of the Fund's capacity-building role—to the extent that its adverse reputational legacy does not get in the way or that its efforts to inform and facilitate debate are not misconstrued as efforts to interfere.
43. These themes, and how Fund outreach fits into countries' complex political dynamics, featured centrally in the evaluation interviews. In some countries such as Uganda, the authorities welcomed Fund outreach. They indicated that at the start of their program they had requested such efforts to help educate the public and gain support for reform; they said the home-grown approach that had been developed in Uganda led to the PRSP approach more generally, which called for engagement with civil society as part of the road to the HIPC. Likewise in other countries, such as Cameroon more recently, the authorities saw the desirability of greater Fund outreach to educate the public and help reduce the stigma that they felt in dealing with the Fund. In Malawi too, the authorities welcomed the Fund's outreach which they saw had increased in recent years, as a central part of educating the Fund teams on the constraints and issues that their country faced and of educating the public on economic and financial issues. But in some other countries, staff said their outreach efforts either did not take place after having been discouraged by the authorities or had brought unintended (and negative) consequences for interactions with the authorities, intensifying conflicts between the Fund's confidential advisor role and the increased focus on outreach and transparency. And in other countries, such as Nigeria, memories of the structural adjustment era necessitated a very cautious and low-key approach, working with think tanks and the private sector, and increasingly with parliamentarians, while emphasizing that there was currently no program involvement with the Fund.
First, the Fund did a good job of articulating an institutional strategy for much of its operational work with PRGF-eligible countries, especially when compared to its work on the other country groups. But it did less well in systematically customizing its strategy to individual country conditions, especially with respect to: (i) the management of face-to-face interactions with the authorities in the first half of the evaluation period; (ii) the repositioning of the Fund with stakeholders beyond the authorities around a more positive message than structural adjustment and privatization; and (iii) the development of country-focused technical assistance programs, ensuring coherence across functional departments and other service providers.
Second, the style of Fund interactions with PRGF-eligible countries improved over the last two years of the evaluation period. Most authorities think disrespectful staff behavior is largely, though not entirely, a thing of the past. The bad news is that it was perceived as a widespread problem during the first half of the evaluation period—in part related to the difficult negotiations referred to above—and remains a component of what many critics and counterparties see as the Fund's signature style.
Third, relationship management in PRGF-eligible countries has generally taken a back seat to time-sensitive and stressful interactions on program negotiations and reviews between headquarters based mission chiefs and the authorities. The resident representative program could be managed more strategically, especially by clarifying roles and accountabilities on the country team and in interfacing with the authorities.
46. The evaluation survey evidence supports the view that the Fund generally succeeded in this goal. As discussed in the main report—and reprised in Figure 2 and Chapter II of this paper, the evaluation—s strategic alignment indicator is considerably higher for the PRGF-eligible countries than for the other country groups: 8 percent higher than for the other emerging economies and 20 percent higher than for the advanced and large emerging economies. In turn, these differences reflect the relatively greater meeting of the minds between the authorities and staff working on PRGF-eligible countries on the purposes and priorities of their interactions with each other. See Figure 14 above.
47. Even so, the clarity of purpose and scope articulated at the institutional level in "The Role of the Fund in Low-Income Countries" was not always as visible at the country level. 32 As one senior area department staff member indicated in an interview with the evaluation team, generally there was no systematic strategic plan for considering Fund engagement at the country level; he said that it depended very much on individual factors largely at the discretion of the mission chief. This had three important dimensions that are highly relevant for the evaluation.
First, management and senior staff did not always pay sufficient attention to the management of face-to-face interactions with the authorities of PRGF-eligible countries, which was delegated to individual mission chiefs. In many cases, this worked fine even in program situations, if either country implementation was broadly on track or if there were implementation issues but a mature and diplomatic mission chief to manage the situation. But as discussed in Chapter II, in several cases in the first half of the evaluation period, interactions between the authorities and staff associated with program interruptions and delays ran aground, leaving the authorities (and staff) feeling bitter towards the Fund—feelings that linger on both sides despite the passage of much time.
Second, there was uneven treatment of the adverse reputational legacy issue in outreach, which is a factor in many PRGF-eligible countries, reflecting the Fund's association with the structural adjustment era of the 1980s and 1990s. As noted in Box 2, in two of the three West African countries visited by the evaluation team, there was progress on this front. In Togo it reflected a hiatus in country relations with other donors and the Fund's playing the role of first responder to the changing conditions in 2006. In Senegal it reflected the conscious attempt by the country team, including the resident representative as a key member, in repositioning the Fund around fiscal transparency. But in Cameroon, despite the urging of the authorities, the dialogue with civil society remains stuck in the past. A more systematic cross-country approach is needed to deal with the past and rebrand around a positive message for the future, such as fiscal transparency, which is central to the Fund's mandate, mission, and work program and popular.
Third, there was uneven attention across mission chiefs to the building and coherence of technical assistance across functional departments and to discussions of it with the authorities and partners. The costs of such omissions have not been so large to date, as they would have been in a more complex organization, given the relatively narrow choice of products and services on offer by the Fund. However, they are relevant for the growing and increasingly complex Fund business of technical assistance, where the importance of ensuring a strategic perspective in the identification of priorities, including for the Regional Strategy Notes remains paramount. Going forward, ensuring work program coherence will become more of an issue. This is an area where the lessons learned from the World Bank's country assistance strategies are relevant, especially for prioritizing across different functional departments' possible services and making sure that the whole of the Fund package adds up to more than the sum of its parts, and is supportive of the country's and the Fund's medium-term objectives.
48. The Fund's success in assisting countries to achieve their objectives depends critically on its staff. Considered below are three dimensions of central relevance to interactions with PRGF-eligible countries: attitude, skills, and turnover.
49. Interviewed authorities readily volunteered that people matter for the Fund's effectiveness. In this connection, and focusing on mission chiefs and resident representatives, they offered high praise for some staff members and sharp criticisms of others. More generally, they said that the Fund's style had been improving, and that the days of the Fund's "dictatorial approach" were a thing of the past. Following up on such a critique of Fund style, the survey asked the authorities whether the staff had shown insufficient respect to them and their colleagues. The comparative results are shown in Figure 15 alongside the answer to the query about whether performance had improved over the past two years. Fourteen percent of official survey respondents from PRGF-eligible countries said that respect was a problem respect was a problem in the 2007–08 period. This number was indeed higher than for the advanced economies, although lower than for the large emerging economies. The good news is that 46 percent said that respectfulness had improved over the past two years—the largest improvement of all country groups. The bad news is that the two numbers taken together suggest that for the 2001–06 part of the evaluation period about which a direct question was not asked, the situation had been worse.
50. Looking at several other behavioral issues in the 2007–08 period, Figure 16 asks whether the survey evidence suggests that Fund staff treated rich countries better than poor countries. To this end, it compares the results for the PRGF-eligible countries with those for the other country groups on issues such as listening, responsiveness, and accountability. In so doing it finds Fund behavior to be comparable or better in the PRGF-eligible countries than elsewhere. This is not to say that the performance levels, generally in the 60–80 percent satisfactory range, are acceptable; but it simply says that problems the Fund may have with listening, responsiveness, and accountability in PRGF eligible countries are not the result of staff's treatment of the least powerful countries, but rather reflect more pervasive tendencies across the institution.
Figure 16.Did Fund Staff Treat Other Countries Better or Worse Than PRGF-Eligible Countries?
1Shows the share of authorities who responded that the IMF did a "good" or "excellent" job.
2Shows the share of authorities who responded "disagree" or "strongly disagree" that there was insufficient accountability for the quality of Fund advice.
52. Nevertheless, as indicated in the interviews with the authorities, skills gaps were beginning to emerge during the evaluation period, especially among PRGF-eligible countries that began the transition to emerging economy status. In one case-study country, ministry of finance staff said the mission skills mix was increasingly a problem, especially among the fiscal staff on the core team (though not among the technical assistance and ROSC missions to that country). Interviewed officials from two other case-study countries raised concerns about the Fund's handling of requests for help with inflation targeting. They felt they had received the brush-off from country teams which said their countries did not meet the pre-conditions. In one case, a subsequent technical assistance mission provided the requested advice and technical support. In another the authorities sought and received the necessary assistance elsewhere.
53. Language skill gaps, raised by 12 percent of surveyed officials, were also raised by several interviewees. One official said that his authorities had been dismayed by the arrival of a mission chief who did not speak the local language. Another said that where members did not speak the local language, it was considered to be a handicap. An official of a third country said that the problem for his team was more with the mission documents, such as the letter of intent and the technical memorandum, which needed to be quickly translated into the local language, than with the discussions. Interviewed staff stressed the importance of local language skills for resident representatives, but less so for mission chiefs. One mission chief said the Fund should make knowledge of the local language (or of a language that is widely spoken in the country) a strict requirement for resident representative positions, and should also provide sufficient language training prior to the assignment. For mission chiefs and mission members, many interviewed staff shared the view of one interviewee, who said that language skills were important but at the end of the day, it was professional skills that mattered the most. This view was expressly shared by some officials, as well, especially for technical experts.
54. Turnover among mission chiefs is more than an irritant for many PRGF-eligible countries. Nearly one-third of the surveyed authorities of PRGF-eligible countries said that the Fund had not provided enough continuity—this proportion is higher than in the emerging economies and the large advanced economies, though considerably lower than in the other advanced economies (Figure 18). Meanwhile, staff pointed to internal incentives that drive rapid turnover; 77 percent of surveyed staff working on PRGF-eligible countries said they had little incentive to work on a country for more than two years—a proportion broadly comparable to those for some other country groups.
55. In the evaluation interviews, almost all country officials complained about staff turnover, and many staff agreed. They spoke of significant turnover of mission members, with adverse consequences for interactions. One said that he said his staff had to continually "retrain" Fund staff, as old Fund team members left and new ones came. Another said the Fund's "revolving-door" approach undermined rather than supported capacity building. Several officials raised special concerns when the mission chief and resident representative changed at the same time, compounding the loss of institutional memory, and called for better management of succession planning in country team coverage. One finance minister referred to a year in which the ministry team had to deal with three different mission chiefs in quick succession.34 Many staff members said that they thought that current tenures were too short to establish relationships of trust with the authorities—although several staff members cautioned that longer tenures carried risks of staff becoming too close to the authorities and losing objectivity.
56. The authorities' survey results give mixed signals on the Fund's strategic management of its relationship with them. For PRGF-eligible countries, over 90 percent of authorities' and staff survey respondents said the Fund's relationship management was conducive to effective interactions. But only 61 percent of authorities rated highly the Fund's performance on "long-term strategic approach to the relationship."35 Meanwhile, when the authorities were asked to compare the Fund's approach to long-term relationship management to those of other organizations, the World Bank's approach scored better (Figure 19). The Fund scored about the same as the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the regional development banks.
57. The evidence also points to several qualitative concerns, discussed below: staff incentives; the role of the resident representative in IMF country teams; and the conduct of IMF management's interactions with the authorities.
58. Area department staff painted a grim picture of how they see the management of their own interactions with the authorities—a picture that was not unique to work on PRGF-eligible countries. As shown in Figure 20, 68 percent of staff working on PRGF-eligible countries said that their interface with the authorities was given too little weight in their annual performance reviews. More than 40 percent said they thought too little time was devoted to interactions, relative to other work, such as servicing the Board and management and responding to reviewers' comments. Almost 40 percent reported not getting adequate support from senior staff and/or management on disagreements with the authorities.
59. The survey asked the authorities and staff about which they thought was the Fund's most effective channel for interactions. As shown in Figure 21, authorities gave the highest scores to the staff, especially resident representatives and to the Executive Directors' offices (OED). From the staff survey, the results were similar, albeit with lower marks for the Executive Directors' offices. The authorities and staff both gave much lower ratings to the Managing Director/Deputy Managing Directors. The dip in staff votes for technical assistance staff reflects the lower marks given to them by program mission chiefs and resident representatives. (The right-hand panel of Figure 21 provides a comparative perspective on authorities' views on the effectiveness of MD/DMD interactions.
Figure 21.Fund Interlocutors: Who Is More Effective? Who Is Less?
Notes: Shows the share of respondents who answered "effective" or "very effective." Results for resident representatives, TA st aff, and program staff include only those respondents who answered that they interacted with them.
61. Interviewed authorities expressed a range of views about resident representative offices, but most said they were comfortable with current arrangements. In terms of staff profile for the job, several officials indicated that their authorities preferred junior staff members, with strong technical skills, who could work well with their own technical staff. They said more senior staff as resident representatives were viewed with caution, given past experience in some cases and general concerns with how senior staff might be perceived by the wider public in others. In praising the current representative, officials of one country spelled out their ideal resident representative, as someone with a good balance of technical, managerial, and diplomatic skills—and good judgment.
62. Staff attitudes were more complicated, especially as regards relations between resident representatives and mission chiefs. Interviewed missions chiefs were unanimous in highlighting the importance of the resident representative function, characterized by one mission chief as the most underestimated asset of the Fund. However, some resident representatives pointed to tensions with mission chiefs about their functions—with some mission chiefs seen to be laissez-faire while others are very controlling—including with respect to the residents representatives' role during missions, where they felt their effectiveness vis-à-vis the authorities was undermined. Summing up the debate, one senior staff member said that in his view, the job of resident representative was not well understood at headquarters, with most resident representatives isolated and not appreciated given the breadth of their responsibilities, but that the converse was also likely true (i.e., that the resident representatives probably did not understand headquarters).
63. Interviewed mission chiefs and resident representatives did share one concern—that resident offices were being cut back. All agreed that relationships with authorities would suffer if resident representative offices were to be closed down, because they have more interactions with the country than the rest of the Fund as they engage in daily and weekly meetings.
64. The weight of the evidence presented in the paper points to the high value that the authorities of PRGF-eligible countries attached to Fund products and services. The authorities of a large majority of these countries sought Fund monitoring and program support at some time during the evaluation period; they saw this support as helping them to secure debt relief and donor funding, although many had concerns about specific aspects of conditionality. Most appreciated the Fund's technical assistance, and wanted more. They also appreciated the Fund's analysis and exchange of views on surveillance, although the dialogue on the preparation, negotiation, and review of programs tended to crowd out the time allocated for more reflective processes.
65. The resulting abundance of traction in Fund interactions with PRGF-eligible countries put the Fund in a position of power, raising questions about how the staff's exercise of that power affected interactions with the authorities in both substance and style. Some authorities saw the Fund's power as useful to them in engaging with the Paris Club and donors, and in disciplining their own spending ministries. But others saw it differently, with particular flash points surrounding difficult face-to-face interactions related to program interruptions and delays especially during the 2002–04 period. Despite the passage of much time, affected authorities—and staff as well—recall these interactions vividly and with bitterness. The authorities' recollections focus on what they perceived as arrogant and/or rigid staff behavior; while the staff's on what they perceived as a lack of clear signals and support from senior staff and management. Meanwhile, for many stakeholders outside government, the adverse reputational legacy of structural adjustment and privatization defined the Fund's image throughout the evaluation period.
66. The evaluation found evidence of progress in the second half of the evaluation period, especially in the last two years. The Fund's policy tool kit, staff attitudes, and external outreach have evolved. Higher priority has been attached to the management of face-to-face interactions, including in times of substantive disagreement between the authorities and staff. These changes, which preceded the onset of the recent global crisis and the steps the Fund has taken to modify its instruments and approach to conditionality, coincided with the graduation of some PRGF-eligible countries from program support into surveillance-only relationships or into formal monitoring arrangements under the Policy Support Instrument (PSI), for which accessing authorities feel greater ownership. Going forward, strong efforts will be needed to ensure the Fund maintains and appropriate balance between flexibility and firmness, to further improve staff attitudes, and to rebrand around a popular message attuned to the Fund's core mission such as fiscal transparency, while also honestly acknowledging problems in its past.
1 Included in emerging economies.
International Monetary Fund (IMF)2002"Acting Chair's Summing Up: Safeguards Assessments—Review of Experience and Next Steps"March14 (Washington).
International Monetary Fund (IMF)2003a"The Role of the Fund in Low-Income Member Countries over the Medium Term—Issues Paper for Discussion" (Washington).
International Monetary Fund (IMF)2003b"Guide for Staff Relations with Civil Society Organizations"October10. Available at www.imf.org/external/np/cso/eng/2003/101003.htm#sum.
International Monetary Fund (IMF)2004"The Role of the Fund in Low-Income Member Countries" (Washington).
International Monetary Fund (IMF)2005"Chairman's Summing Up: Executive Board Meeting on Conclusions of the Task Force on IMF Technical Assistance" (Washington).
International Monetary Fund (IMF)2006"Acting Chair's Summing Up: Making the Misreporting Cases Less Onerous in De Minimis Cases" EBM/06/67July21; BUFF/06/125July26 (Washington).
International Monetary Fund (IMF)2008a"The Role of the Fund in Low-Income Countries."Available at www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2008/061308.pdf.
International Monetary Fund (IMF)2008b"IMF Executive Board Concludes Discussion on the Role of the Fund in Low-Income Countries,"Public Information Notice No. 08/125September26. Available at www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pn/2008/pn08125.htm.
International Monetary Fund (IMF)2008c"Enhancing the Impact of Fund Technical Assistance."Available at www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pn/2008/pn08125.htm.
According to the IMF's PRGF Fact Sheet, "Eligibility is based principally on the IMF's assessment of a country's per capita income, drawing on the cutoff point for eligibility to World Bank concessional lending (currently 2007 per capita gross national income of $1,095)." See www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/prgf.htm. Eligibility also takes into account country access to financial markets and status as a small island economy. See Annex 1 for the list of 77 countries, from the IMF World Economic Outlook country classification. The sole exclusion from the WEO is India, which the evaluation included among the emerging economies.
World Bank, World Development Indicators database, October 7, 2009.
The "nonprogram countries" among the PRGF-eligible countries are: Bhutan, Eritrea, Kiribati, Maldives, Myanmar, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Somalia, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.
As in all such endeavors, the evidence may be subject to misinterpretation. To manage such risks, the evaluation triangulated across individual sources of evidence and applied judgment and other knowledge when different sources suggested different answers. In terms of possible interpretation and measurement risks, the evaluation survey was quite complex, with many questions and many respondents from a large number of countries; all this raises the risk that some questions may have been interpreted differently by different recipients. Interview bias is a common feature of such evidence, subject to potential biases on both sides. Finally, the use of the documentary evidence is subject to many sources of bias, not the least of which is its having been written for another time and another audience—one quite familiar with the Fund's culture and issues, and one where strict word limits apply to all documents, so that many issues of interest receive quite abbreviated attention.
For the authorities' survey, one questionnaire was sent to the ministry of finance and one to the national central bank where one existed.
Nigeria and Solomon Islands are the exceptions.
The project also involved a country visit to Mali, which is not one of the evaluation sample countries.
Guidance to staff on the conduct of bilateral surveillance is set out in the May 2005 Surveillance Guidance Note—supplemented by the August 2008 note on "Guidance on Operational Aspects of the 2007 Surveillance Decision" (on treatment of exchange rate issues) and by two further notes, of December 2006 and February 2007, that focus on implementing recommendations from the Fund's Medium-Term Strategy, especially with respect to surveillance agendas. The 2005 Surveillance Guidance Note replaced the Operational Guidance Note for Staff following the 2002 Biennial Surveillance Review. The Surveillance Guidance Note consolidated guidance on treatment of issues bearing on surveillance that were previously contained in various other notes and memoranda. Issued after the close of the evaluation period, recent guidance for financial sector surveillance ("Financial Sector Guidance Note," April 24, 2009) sets out (i) how to identify risks to macro-financial stability; (ii) policy and regulatory considerations; and (iii) operational issues. There is separate guidance for the conduct of FSAPs and FSAP updates. See http://www-int.imf.org/depts/pdr/Surveillance/Financial-Sector/FSAP/fsap-procedures-guide.pdf; http://www-int.imf.org/depts/pdr/Operational-Guidance/Surveillance-GNMay2005.doc; http://www.imf.org/external/np/pp/eng/2008/080408.pdf; and http://www-int.imf.org/depts/pdr/Operational-Guidance/SM02292.pdf.
There have been recent changes in access limits and norms in July 2009, updating the note from 2004 and including ESF; in PRSP-related procedures in January 2009; and the adoption of review-based monitoring introduced in April 2009.
See Box 2 of the main report.
In the context of other evidence pointing to a change in staff and attitudes in 2007–08 compared with previously, this larger difference for 2001–08 compared with 2007–08 may be capturing, as a surrogate rating, the views of current staff about the effectiveness of their predecessors.
See also the background technical document on the evaluation's documentary evidence.
The evaluation sample countries, for example, included two important such cases, one involving a safeguard assessment, which ultimately led to the demise of a PRGF, and another involving misreporting, which was ultimately recognized to have constituted a de minimis situation.
There also were instances during the evaluation period in which the "institutional view" was argued by the IMF Legal Department, in connection with a case of misreporting in Pakistan, or by Treasurer's, with respect to the safeguards issue in Vietnam. See IMF (2002) and 2006).
Several authorities also pointed to instances in which mission chiefs said they tended to agree with the authorities but it was not in their brief. However, many staff members saw this as more frequently said than meant, as a vehicle for smoothing their relationship with the authorities while carrying out their instructions for headquarters, to which they had contributed.
Of the 86 respondents reporting no contact with the IMF, only 3 percent said that they had requested a meeting but were not given an appointment. About two-thirds of those who had met with staff said they found the meetings useful, and would like to meet more often. They had mostly met with Fund resident representatives or missions from headquarters; they had almost never met with the Executive Director for the country either locally or in Washington.
The survey asked the CSO representatives whether interactions with the Fund were important to their work both in the last two years and over the eight-year evaluation period. It also asked whether interactions were useful in the last two years and over the whole eight years. Answers were nearly identical for the two time periods: 78 percent thought interactions were important over the last two years, and 77 percent over the whole eight years. 68 percent thought interactions were useful over the last two years, and 65 percent over the whole eight years.
Scholte (2009). See also IEO (2007).
See the background technical document on the interviews for more detail.
See, for example, IMF (2003a and 2004).
As documented in IEO (2007) and elsewhere.
The Fund has experimented over the years with initiatives that have been likened to country strategies or that have contained elements of country strategies, but during the evaluation period its approach to strategy at the country level remained scattered and unsystematic. Fund experiments included country strategy papers, including one for Uganda in 2001, the ex post assessments program introduced in 2002, and the preparation of surveillance agendas, which had some potential as a strategic vehicle before being discontinued in 2008.
See Figure 15 of the main report.
Such a case seems to be exceptional, however, being partly associated with the removal of a failed mission chief before his/her time and replacement by an interim mission chief while an appropriate successor was being identified.
Mission chiefs were more sanguine than the authorities: 82 percent of them thought the Fund did a good or excellent job. But resident representatives were less: 53 percent of them thought the Fund did a good or excellent job.
The apparent split between the views of resident representatives and the views of the authorities parallels a similar finding from IEO's evaluation of IMF work in Sub-Saharan Africa (IEO, 2007), which found that the work pressures on the resident representatives came less from the relationship with the authorities, who were satisfied with the services they received, than from the growing burden of coordinating with the donors of decentralizing budget support and of doing outreach, which many resident representatives felt was outside their comfort zone.


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Click here to visit Facebook to request your free sample of Green Mountain coffee. Just watch a short video and fill out a short information form to request your free sample. You can choose to receive ground coffee or a K-cup sample pack. Hurry because this offer runs out quickly.
Hi, thanks, i love my coffee. smile.
I am always willing to try new coffee. If it comes from Costa Rica it must be good. My sister brought me back some coffee and it was great.
Would love to try new coffee.


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Watch: Bruce Dern Works His Best Poses — In a Bathrobe
The veteran actor dressed down for this shoot
By TIME Video Feb. 28, 2014
Nebraska star Bruce Dern hasn't been nominated for an Oscar since 1979, but it looks like the 77-year-old actor's career is far from winding down. Dern's most recent movie role earned him a 2014 nomination for Best Actor and "the sort of praise that makes and remakes careers," as Vulture wrote.
So how did his acting career begin? Dern can pinpoint it to one specific moment — back when he was in college and didn't make the Olympic team as a runner. Watch the video above to learn more.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Cisco Systems sued Apple Inc. in federal court Wednesday, saying the computer maker's new iPhone violates its trademark.
The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco federal court, came just a day after Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple iPhone in dramatic fashion at a trade show in San Francisco.
But even while Jobs was trumpeting the product during his keynote address to Apple faithful, the matter of the product's naming had not been resolved behind the scenes between two of the biggest names in Silicon Valley.
I figured they'd play nice, I figured Apple, that is, Steve Jobs, wouldn't be so stupid. Sure, he got away with this crap when Apple (Computers) fought Apple (Records), but Cisco is worth (let's check the article) something like $174 billion, "the most richly valued company in Silicon Valley[.]"
It is also worth noting that they are suing for injunctive relief, a court order commanding Apple to top using the name "iPhone". They can easily ask for that because they have a product on the market, using their registered mark. Apple is 5+ months away from delivering product. Cisco's lawyers can easily argue that Apple can, at this point, easily change the product name. Order granted!
One analyst thinks that Cisco has better things to do with their time and money then sue over a product name. Personally I think Apple has better things to do with their time and money then to deliberately try and still someone else's registered, used trademark.


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Thursday: The Infowars Nightly News. Trump Hits A Home Run In Mexico
On this Thursday, September 1st, 2016 of the Infowars Nightly News, Donald Trump made a last minute trip to Mexico City where he showed off his negotiation skills in a meeting with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto. Plus the establishment plants fake news stories on the internet in an attempt to make alternative media irrelevant. Hosted by Darrin McBreen - Watch now
Monday: The Infowars Nightly News. Bernie Bros Boo The Democratic Socialist
On this Monday, July 26th, 2016 of the Infowars Nightly News, The DNC crowd turn against Bernie Sander when he announces we must elect Hillary. Meanwhile, some celebrities show up to support Hillary Clinton, while others are there to protest. Then the mayor of the town in one of Mexico's most violent drug corridors was shot to death and it's the second mayor killed in two days. plus a texas sheriff deputy is s shot dead in his own home. All that plus exclusive report from the DNC. - Watch now
Thursday: The Infowars Nightly News. We Should All Just Worship Hillary And Be Done With It
On this Wednesday, June 8th, 2016 of the Infowars Nightly News, Our reporters are detained at Bilderberg, which according to some media outlets does not exist. then whats a realistic scenario for what would happen if food stamps stop working. after that guest star Obama says that politics is not a reality tv show. and the incredible response border residents gave to the prospects of the wall. - Watch now
Tuesday: The Infowars Nightly News. Live Super Tuesday Primary Coverage
On this Tuesday, April 26th, 2016 of the Infowars Nightly News, Breaking news of an unholy alliance between the Mexican drug cartel and ISIS, as Islamic terrorist stationed in Mexico cross into the United States to explore American targets. Then a formerly transgender woman exposes the leftist Trans agenda. Meanwhile Social justice warriors in Austin vote to ban travel to states opposed to transgender bathrooms all that plus live coverage and analysis of the Presidential Primaries. - Watch now
Monday: The Alex Jones Show. Obama Has Declared Open Season On Cops
On this Monday, August 31st edition of the Alex Jones Show, we cover the latest push for gun control, the removal of a Jefferson Davis statue from a liberal college campus and how Obama is taking heat for the execution of a Texan deputy sheriff. Also, the Food Babe, Vani Hari, joins the show to discuss her new campaign to stop Subway from using meat treated with numerous antibiotics and other chemicals. And the director of the film Cartel Land, Matthew Heineman, gives the latest on the collapse of Mexico and the drug trade. Also, in the fourth hour, Joe Biggs and Jakari Jackson cover breaking developments and interview Carl Pittman, the constitutional candidate for Harris Co., Texas, sheriff. - Watch now
Friday: The Alex Jones Show. The Great Prison Wall Of The American Border
On this Friday, August 21 edition of the Alex Jones Show, we cover a variety of topics, including the 'anchor baby' controversy, the current stock market decline and how international corporations work with governments to surveil and control the population. Investigative journalist Jon Rappoport joins the show to discuss collectivism vs individuality, particularly how various groups are trying to re-create society without free individuals. Other topics covered include Wipe gate and the downfall of Hillary Clinton. You don't want to miss today's show! - Watch now
Monday: The Infowars Nightly News. FLASHBACK: Seymour Hersh: Bin Laden Raid "One Big Lie"
On this Monday, May 11 edition of the Infowars Nightly News, Vaccines kill children in Mexico and what really happened in the Bin Laden raid. US government develops a Matrix-like world simulating the virtual you, dubious isis terror threats as patriot act comes up for reauthorization, and Is the UN using vaccines to secretly sterilize women all over the globe? - Watch now
Aerial Search For ISIS Camp at U.S. Border
Infowars reporter Joe Biggs takes to the skies in search of the reported ISIS base hidden among Cartel compounds just across the U.S. border in Anapra, Mexico. While flying over Anapra there are very strange secluded compounds with what look to be religious ritual grounds nearby. There is also a bizarre line of people walking to a truck in the middle of nowhere just at the base of the mountains where the border opens up and provides free reign into the United States. - Watch now
ISIS Camp Discovered at U.S. Border!
Infowars reporter Joe Biggs touches down at the U.S. Mexico border where it has been reported that ISIS has established a compound in Juarez, NM among numerous Cartel groups. We know that the U.S. Government has been caught smuggling drugs and weapons into America, are they now smuggling in ISIS? - Watch now
Sunday: The Alex Jones Show. 20th Anniversary Of The Oklahoma City Bombing
On this Sunday, April 19 edition of the Alex Jones Show, we cover the 20th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. Other topics include the state of Texas ready to approve open-carry legislation in defense of the Second Amendment, Rand Paul's remarks about challenger Hillary Clinton, the funding and cronyism fiasco of the Clinton foundation, and the latest on the FBI seeking to glean intelligence on ISIS in Mexico from Infowars reporter Joe Biggs during his recent trip to Mexico to find out the truth about reported terror camps along the border. - Watch now


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text:
Pacific Edge: Three Californias (Paperback)
By Kim Stanley Robinson
This is book number 3 in the Three Californias series.
#1: The Wild Shore: Three Californias (Paperback): $27.99
#2: The Gold Coast: Three Californias (Paperback): $27.99
The concluding book in Kim Stanley Robinson's critically-acclaimed Three Californias Trilogy, Pacific Edge.
2065: In a world that has rediscovered harmony with nature, the village of El Modena, California, is an ecotopia in the making. Kevin Claiborne, a young builder who has grown up in this "green" world, now finds himself caught up in the struggle to preserve his community's idyllic way of life from the resurgent forces of greed and exploitation.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON is an American science fiction writer. He is the author of more than 20 books, including the international bestselling Mars trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, and more recently Red Moon, New York 2140, and 2312, which was a New York Times bestseller nominated for all seven of the major science fiction awards—a first for any book. 2008 he was named a "Hero of the Environment" by Time magazine, and he works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute, the Clarion Writers' Workshop, and UC San Diego's Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. In 2016 he was given the Heinlein Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction, and asteroid 72432 was named "Kimrobinson." In 2017 he was given the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society.
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Publisher: Orb Books
Series: Three Californias
Fiction / Science Fiction / Apocalyptic & Post-Apocalyptic
Fiction / Alternative History
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text:
Four-acre site off State Road has been cleared for future bingo hall in Aquinnah.
Town, Tribe Square Off Before High Court Panel
Noah Asimow
The town of Aquinnah and Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) were back in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit Monday morning, fiercely tangling over whether the tribe needs to obtain state and local building permits before beginning construction on a proposed bingo hall project in the town.
In a 45-minute virtual hearing held before the second highest court in the country, attorneys for the two sides battled over the scope of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) — with the tribe arguing in forceful language that it supersedes state and local laws with respect to the non-gaming aspects of a proposed casino development, and the town arguing that it does not.
The appellate court's decision will have sweeping implications for the tribe's long-running and controversial efforts to build a class II gaming facility on tribal land within the town. Tribal officials have continually asserted their refusal to comply with local permitting regulations, arguing that they are unnecessary, onerous and restrictive.
Oral arguments before the three-judge appellate court panel on Monday were held via video conference, but the hearing was only available to the public through Youtube audio.
The panel included the Hons. Juan R. Torruella, O. Rogeriee Thompson and William J. Kayatta Jr. Attorney William Jay, a Washington D.C.-based partner at the law firm Goodwin, argued on behalf of the town. Scott Crowell, an Arizona-based Indian rights attorney, argued on behalf of the tribe.
Monday marked the second time in recent years that the town and tribe have met in the U.S Court of Appeals. In 2017, the tribe appealed a district court ruling that effectively blocked it from constructing a gaming facility within the town. The appellate court overturned the lower court ruling in a unanimous 3-0 decision, opening the door for the current development. Judges Torruella and Kayatta were both on the 2017 panel.
But when the tribe clear cut four acres of land for the proposed 10,000-square-foot, 250-game facility in early 2019 without first seeking a building permit, the town bristled, referring the project to the Martha's Vineyard Commission and arguing that while the tribe had the right to build the facility, the town had the right to permit the facility's non-gaming features.
After a U.S District Court hearing, the Hon. Dennis Saylor 4th issued an amended final judgment last year reflecting that distinction, throwing the bingo hall project into flux. The tribe immediately appealed, setting the stage for Monday's long-awaited hearing before the appellate court.
The cleared construction site has been dormant for months, fenced-off from the road with three building trailers and a scattering of no-trespassing signs.
At the hearing Monday, the attorney for the tribe forcefully argued against Judge Saylor's ruling, contending that the town was attempting to restrict the tribe's right to gaming by exerting control over the non-gaming aspects of the proposed facility, such as its aesthetics and parking.
"The ability to indirectly do what you cannot do directly, that constitutes the interference of the tribe's exercise of its rights, which warrants [IGRA's] preemption of those state and local laws," Mr. Crowell argued. "From the very beginning the town has looked to its non-gaming laws to interfere with the tribe's exercise of its gaming rights."
The town countered, arguing that the facility's gaming and non-gaming regulations were in fact legally separate — with one subject to local town and state jurisdiction, and the other not. The town, therefore, should have the right to permit the non-gaming aspects of the proposed bingo hall despite IGRA's authority over its gaming aspects, meaning the court should uphold Judge Saylor's decision, attorneys argued.
"Our position is that under the panel's prior ruling, the passage of IGRA prevents the town from regulating gaming, per se, but in all other respects its regulatory authority remains undiminished," Mr. Jay said.
Arguments were presented in strictly-enforced 15-minute blocks, with the three-judge panel peppering each attorney with questions during their allotted time.
Mr. Crowell began, mainly answering questions from Judges Kayatta and Thompson regarding whether liquor licensing would be covered by IGRA, and whether there were specific town regulations that would prevent the tribe from complying with the applicable federal regulations. Judge Kayatta questioned Mr. Crowell on the issue of wattage, for instance.
"Say something has to be five watts under town law, and three watts under tribal law approved by the federal government. You could comply with both, even though they are different?" Mr. Kayatta asked.
"I believe that would be a conflict preventing the tribe from exercising its rights under IGRA," Mr. Crowell replied. "When the town meets the federal requirements, and the town says that's not good enough, that is an interference with the tribe's gaming laws."
Mr. Jay presented town arguments, answering a barrage of questions from Judge Torruella regarding the case's legal and procedural history — and then questions from all three judges concerning the specific aspects of the facility that the town would be looking to regulate.
Responding to Judge Torruella, Mr. Jay said the town could permit or regulate the color of the bingo hall, its aesthetics, as well as its parking. But he said the town could not regulate how many dealers it used or what specific games were played — issues that were clearly covered by IGRA.
"If it is a neutral, generally applicable rule that applies throughout the town, it is going to apply on the settlement lands just as it applies anywhere else," Mr. Jay told Judge Torruella. "We're not claiming any authority to regulate the actual conduct of the games. That is an area where IGRA is a detailed federal regulation."
The judges bristled at aspects of the town's argument, saying that if the town has the ability to permit non-gaming aspects of the facility, such as parking, they could effectively restrict the success of the gaming aspects of the facility.
"I think you could see though that any one of those regulations would, with a wink-wink, undermine the successful operation of a casino," Judge Kayatta said.
Other judges suggested the often gray area between gaming and non-gaming aspects of a casino could lead to continuing, and interminable, court battles over the question of jurisdiction.
"Do we have a federal case every time they say three and you say one, et cetera et cetera?" Judge Torruella asked Mr. Jay.
"This could go on and on and on and on," Judge Thompson said.
Mr. Jay disagreed.
"The relationship between the town and tribe has gone on for much longer," Mr. Jay said. "They have sought permits in the past, and have been granted permits in the past . . . I don't think everything is going to be the subject of litigation, just as I agree with Judge Saylor that there is absolutely no evidence that applies to the town to date that there has been a wink-wink allocation of [town authority]."
Mr. Crowell seized on the point in his rebuttal, arguing that allowing the town and commission to permit the facility could doom it to failure.
"This opinion, if allowed to stand, allows the MVC and town to kill the tribe's gaming operation with a thousand cuts," Mr. Crowell said.
Only the appellant — in this case, the tribe — is given an opportunity for rebuttal.
The hearing ended up going slightly over its allotted time, with the audio stream in certain instances cutting out or becoming garbled, and judges struggling momentarily to operate their audio equipment.
By the hearing's finish, even the judges were ready for a recess — with three cases still on the docket for the day.
"We need to take a break right now," Judge Torruella said.
Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head
T Bone, Oak Bluffs
Yeah, the town is not gonna win. The Tribe's lawyer made several persuasive arguments. Crowell is right -- the town will fight this forever if given the chance. Justice for the Tribe requires they win this.
Jeronimo, Arizona
Shameful that the actions of a small part of the tribe with this foolish gaming project are going to destroy that same natural heritage that they should cherish and protect.
September 15, 2020 - 7:18am
Adelaide Kent, New York
Other builders in town have sought and received permits. Why is the tribe arguing against established procedures (which it appears they have followed in the past.) Rather than the tribe being oppressed by these regulations, it appears that the tribe is seeking special treatment because of their tribal status.
Tamara Chin, Oak Bluffs
It's their land and actually their island....now other people have set rules for them. That's the problem here in America. Just because you stole the land doesn't make it yours.
September 16, 2020 - 12:18pm
TJ Lang, Ohio
As a longtime visitor to the Vineyard, it saddens me to read about a possible gaming facility on the island. One of the characteristics that makes Martha's Vineyard so special is its lack of commercialization. I love that there is no McDonald's or chain restaurants. The addition of gaming or a casino hall sounds so tacky and doesn't fit with the beautiful, peaceful atmosphere of the island. I would think the tribes would want to protect this.
September 17, 2020 - 12:09am
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