The Politics of Hard Choices: IMF Programs and Government Spending

Irfan Nooruddin and Joel W. Simmons

International Organization, 2006, vol. 60, issue 4, 1001-1033

Abstract: A central component of International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs is reducing government budget deficits. We ask how domestic political considerations shape the distribution of cuts made by governments in IMF programs. Our central finding is that IMF programs shrink the role played by domestic politics. While democracies allocate larger shares of their budgets to public services in the absence of IMF programs, the difference between democracies and nondemocracies disappears under IMF programs. This result has important implications for our understanding of government spending priorities under different resource constraints.We dedicate this article to the memory of Harold K. Jacobson. Robert Kaufman, Lisa Martin, Joan Nelson, and two anonymous reviewers for IO provided valuable comments on earlier drafts, and Chris Achen, Chris Adolph, Leah Anderson, Carew Boulding, Sarah Brooks, Chelsea Brown, Lawrence Broz, Eric Chang, Dan Corstange, Rob Franzese, Nate Jensen, Marcus Kurtz, Margaret Levi, Autumn Payton, Nita Rudra, Heidi Sherman, and James Vreeland offered helpful advice. We thank Autumn Payton for research assistance. Earlier versions were presented at the 2004 Midwest Political Science Association Meetings, the 2004 American Political Science Association Meetings, the 2005 workshop on “Distributive Politics and Social Protection in the 21st Century” at Ohio State's Mershon Center, and the 2005 International Studies Association Meetings. All errors remain our own.

Date: 2006
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (55)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:intorg:v:60:y:2006:i:04:p:1001-1033_06

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Organization from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().