Implementation Plan in Response to Board-Endorsed Recommendations Arising from the IEO Evaluation of Structural Conditionality in IMF-Supported Programs

This paper presents an implementation plan for Board-endorsed recommendations arising from the IEO Evaluation of Structural Conditionality in IMF-Supported Programs (“the IEO Report”). The IEO report’s recommendations and the views of the Executive Board are summarized in Section II, followed by a description of the proposed initiatives which make up this implementation plan (Section III). Section IV concludes with a discussion of the projected resource cost associated with this plan. The IEO evaluation provides a renewed impetus to the Fund’s efforts to emphasize parsimony and criticality in the setting of structural conditions. The IEO report’s key findings echo in many respects those provided in the 2005 conditionality Review; specifically, evidence exists of a substantive shift in the composition of structural conditionality towards Fund core areas and Fund-supported programs cover narrower areas of reform. The IEO report argues, however, that conditionality may have covered areas not critical to the goals of Fund-supported programs, suggesting scope for strengthening the parsimony and criticality aspects of the 2002 Conditionality Guidelines (CG).