Challenging Neoliberal Conditionality: Tracing IMF Lending Policies from 2007-2012

The conditionality agreements of the International Monetary Fund have received a significant amount of criticism from the 1980s and 1990s and into the 2000s.  Critics have found little reassurance from the IMF's attempts to reform conditionality after 2000.  The 1980s marked a time where conditionality on IMF loans required structural adjustment and the imposition of austere fiscal measures.  The streamlining initiative in 2000 possessed only slight quantitative modification to lending conditionality.  However, recent changes in the Fund's lending policy occuring between 2007 and 2012 may finally display the institution's ability to listen, learn, and adapt policy toward a conditionality regime utilizing policy outside of the neoliberal framework.  This thesis examines these new policies and their implications for neoliberalism where the term represents an approach to economic growth that demands privatization, deregulation, and  weakening the role of the public sector.  It provides a history of conditionality reforms and positions the most recent reforms in lending policy in the evolving neoliberal context.