Abstract
This book seeks to see how far the International Monetary Fund (IMF) can influence economic policy choices using Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan as cases. André Broome aims to correct over-exaggerated accounts of the IMF's power and of the power of its leading country members. Instead, he aims to ‘see like the IMF’ as he puts it (p. 10), to look at how the organisation interacts with states and attempts to shape their economic policy through persuasion. The three Central Asian cases are, it is claimed, good test cases of the IMF's power since each was engaged in reform, each asked for advice and loans, and they started with similar institutional arrangements.
The results of Broome's survey are not going to be surprising to anyone familiar with the history of Central Asia: Kyrgyzstan followed IMF advice more than Kazakhstan, which followed it more than Uzbekistan. The reason, as Broome rightly argues, was that the degree to which the IMF's advice chimed with local needs and political reasoning varied across the three cases. The IMF's power to shape policy is therefore contingent on local politics. The wishes of the IMF's more powerful members are not simply brought to bear on the economic agendas of states that seek its advice. Broome argues that the role of IMF officials in interpreting how countries should be treated mediates interests and ideology and plays a major role in shaping how states access funds. Broome's findings on how the IMF works are more interesting than his discussion of Central Asia.
The explanation for why Central Asian states reacted to the IMF in the manner that they did is a bit thin. Local conditions, in particular different elite and economic structures, are not really discussed in depth. This makes the book a little lopsided and unfocused as a comparison of the factors that influence how states interact with the IMF. It also makes it harder to see what kind of understanding the IMF had of what was going on in the region. Did its officials understand the politics of the region as well as the technical issues surrounding monetary reform? How did the lenses of their preferred policies shape that understanding? Getting some grasp of these issues needs some larger understanding of the region's politics and the differences within it, and also would allow for more comparison with other areas. Broome's book is therefore a useful guide to the limits on IMF influence.