The Unassuming Economist

From a book chapter by Ayse Kaya:

“Employing text data analysis on over 6,500 International Monetary Fund (IMF) documents from different operational units of the organization, this chapter first finds that the IMF’s approach to inequality has changed over the past two decades, but in a manner that is uneven across the different constituent parts of the organization. This evidence lends further support to the notion of IMF and IO “fragmented change” developed by Kaya and Reay (2019). Second, the chapter finds that while inequality now is more prominent in the IMF’s policy advice, it matters only insofar as inequality is related to core macroeconomic issues—institutional change has occurred in a “mission-consistent” manner. Thus, the IMF has more focus on inequality in institutional thinking but less in institutional output.”