With a trillion dollars in lending capability, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is one of the best-equipped institutions to deal with the Covid-19 public health and financial crisis. Since March, the IMF has met an “unprecedented number of calls for emergency financing” with “unprecedented speed and magnitude,” through renegotiations of rapid credit facilities, refinancing initiatives, and debt relief assistance for more than 100 countries, totaling over $100 billion in disbursements so far. In the early days of the pandemic, there was a great deal of concern among anticorruption advocates over the way these emergency funds would be monitored (see collections of pieces here and here). The IMF’s initial approach generally did not impose formal transparency or governance requirements as a condition for receiving emergency Covid relief funds. Rather, the IMF chose to rely more on after-the-fact safeguards: recipient countries were told to spend as needed but to “keep the receipts.”
The IMF’s approach is understandable. As Jason Keene argued on this blog, the IMF at that early stage faced a trade-off between speed and transparency, and may have reasonably concluded that it would not be advisable to bargain over transparency measures if doing so would slow the deployment of much-needed funds. This conclusion, as a May 2020 IMF publication revealed, was influenced by the IMF’s experience with the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa: Many, including a prominent public health journal, blamed the IMF for the lethality of the Ebola epidemic, provoking a backlash against what was seen as unduly burdensome loans, a focus on austerity, and the underfunding of medical systems in vulnerable countries (see here, here, and here). Given this background, it’s understandable that the IMF might, on balance, favor speed over transparency, providing loans for Covid-related public health and budgetary shortfalls without much conditionality.