The IMF board backed recommendations to focus loan programs on fewer, deeper reforms. The Fund says budget adjustments should be front-loaded only as far as feasible, alongside realistic growth measures and adequate social spending to protect vulnerable people.
The review assessed IMF-supported programs from January 2018 to December 2024, spanning the COVID-19 pandemic, the US-China trade war and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Recommendations also call for balancing revenue growth with fiscal consolidation, improving risk assessment and using more realistic project-financing assumptions. The IMF said the goal is better implementation, not lower standards. Goyal said some countries restored stability with IMF support, but others had not regained medium-term stability; the Fund is introducing a tool to sequence structural reforms and help staff adjust programs when shocks arise.
Some civil-society groups feared the review could leave developing countries facing tougher austerity amid rising public debt, soaring borrowing costs, falling official aid and repeated shocks. Eric LeCompte of Jubilee USA Network said IMF policies had harmed public goods such as healthcare in some countries. Former IMF strategy chief Martin Muehleisen, who said he had not seen the review, questioned whether the Fund had sufficiently insisted on program conditions being met and withheld disbursements when they were not.
