The International Monetary Fund's Standby Arrangements with Portugal. An Ex-Ante Application of the Washington Consensus

Ana Bela Nunes

No 2011/44, Working Papers GHES - Office of Economic and Social History from ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, GHES - Social and Economic History Research Unit, Universidade de Lisboa

Abstract: At two different moments (1978-1979 and 1983-1985), Portugal had to call upon the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for financial assistance in order to resolve serious balance of payment crises. In both cases, the terms for the implementation of IMF conditionality were agreed before the so-called Washington Consensus (WC) was established in 1989. The paper examines to what extent the Portuguese experience under the stand-by arrangements agreed with the IMF would later be embodied in the WC strong conditionality practices. Several similarities were apparent, since many of the WC prescriptions were basically influenced by IMF conditionality practices, which had been adapted during the 1980s to include further structural measures. Some significant differences can also be noticed: as the theoretical and ideological background of the we would only be crystallized in the second half of the 1980s, the we basically focused on Latin American developing economies, while Portugal, a European high-medium income country, had been implementing major institutional reforms since 1977, in order to meet the terms required to become an EEC member.

Keywords: Washington Consensus; International Monetary Fund; Portugal stand-by arrangrnents JEL classification : N14, N44, 023. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ghes.rc.iseg.ulisboa.pt/wp/wp442011.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found

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:ise:gheswp:wp442011

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers GHES - Office of Economic and Social History from ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, GHES - Social and Economic History Research Unit, Universidade de Lisboa GHES - Social and Economic History Research Unit, ISEG - Lisbon School of Economics and Management, Universidade de Lisboa, Rua do Quelhas 6, 1200-781 LISBON, PORTUGAL.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Natalia Nobre (natalia@iseg.ulisboa.pt).