Download or read book IMF Programs written by Robert J. Barro and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: IMF lending practices respond to economic conditions but are also sensitive to political-economy variables. Specifically, the sizes and frequencies of loans are influenced by a country's presence at the Fund, as measured by the country's share of quotas and professional staff. IMF lending is also sensitive to a country's political and economic proximity to some major shareholding countries of the IMF -- the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. We measured political proximity by voting patterns in the United Nations and economic proximity by bilateral trading volumes. These results are of considerable interest for their own sake but also provide instrumental variables for estimating the effects of IMF lending on economic performance. Instrumental estimates indicate that the size of IMF lending is insignificantly related to economic growth in the contemporaneous five-year period but has a significantly negative effect in the subsequent five years.