Notwithstanding a lack of revisionist policy taken by IMF with regard to Neoliberalism, and no apparent suggestion by IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) – an office totally independent of IMF, as it reviews its progress – for adopting this revision against the neoliberal inclination of IMF, yet the IEO’s recent report titled ‘The IMF’s exceptional access policy: evaluation report December 2024’ where it reviews the performance of EAP deserves praise since it points out how IMF has been much below par when it came to assessing which countries qualified for this policy, given their lack of adherence to previous IMF programmes, and their glaringly apparent recidivist behaviour, especially when it was quite clear that governments took IMF bailout as a means to delay reforms for reasons not because they were repelled by neoliberal policies, given they followed basically similar outside of the IMF programme, but because they wished to push the can of however weak reform down the road to protect as much political capital as they could from safeguarding rent-seeking vested groups.

A December 12, 2024 Financial Times (FT) published article ‘IMF faces internal attack over flaws in biggest bailouts’ pointed out with regard to sub-optimal screening process adopted by IMF while extending resources under EAP: ‘The IMF’s in-house watchdog has criticised the fund over a lack of consistency in some of its biggest bailouts of the past two decades, calling on officials to address claims they succumb to political pressures to back big, risky repeat borrowers.

Rules for outsized loans to countries such as Argentina, Ukraine and Egypt needed an overhaul as “perceptions of a lack of even-handedness” were affecting the fund’s credibility, the IMF’s independent evaluation office said in a report on Thursday.’

Neoliberalism, IMF’s exceptional financing & recidivist behaviour of programme countries—I

Similarly, with regard to Pakistan – a prolonged user of IMF resources for a number of decades now, and also quite recidivist in its approach with regard to approaching IMF for new programmes – a country, which although........

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