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This paper describes the policy changes that the Fund has made since the October 2007 IMFC meeting and the ways in which we plan to refocus the Fund’s work to support our members more strongly. It also describes the steps that management, staff, and the Executive Board have agreed to put our own house in order—to reform our governance, contain our spending, and solve our income problem.

This paper describes the functions, policies, and operations of the IMF. The IMF is an independent international organization, and is a cooperative of 185 member countries, whose objective is to promote world economic stability and growth. The member countries are the shareholders of the cooperative, providing the capital of the IMF through quota subscriptions. In return, the IMF provides its members with macroeconomic policy advice, financing in times of balance-of-payments need, and technical assistance and training to improve national economic management.

This 2001 Annual Report reviews economic developments in the world during FY2000. Output growth in emerging Asia picked up in 2000 as this region continued its recovery from the 1997–98 crisis. The pace of economic expansion, however, slowed from mid-2000, largely as a result of the U.S. slowdown, higher oil prices, a decline in regional equity markets, and, in some countries, concerns about delays of corporate and financial restructuring and a decline in electronics exports. The financial year 2001 saw the IMF actively engaged in the process of reform.

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Ghana was one of the first African countries to adopt a comprehensive IMF reform program and the one that has sustained adjustment longest. Yet, questions of Ghana's compliance - to what extent did it comply, how did it manage compliance, what patterns of non-compliance existed, and why? - have not been systematically investigated and remain poorly understood. This book argues that understanding the domestic political environment is crucial in explaining why compliance, or the lack thereof, occurs. Akonor maintains that compliance with IMF conditionality in Ghana has had high political costs and thus, non-compliance occurred once the political survival of a regime was at stake.

This paper finds that reforms introduced by the IMF to promote transparency have created more informed markets and reduced borrowing costs for those emerging market countries that volunteered for them. Using a quarterly panel estimation with fixed country effects, we find that sovereign spreads fall following the adoption of three different transparency reforms. The effects are economically important, especially for those countries with low initial transparency. We use two-stage least squares to address any endogeneity in the timing of reforms exploiting internal IMF timetables that are unrelated to country events. Next, using a panel GARCH specification, we show that spreads move more than normal in the days immediately following publication of IMF country documents.