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Comment by kaonashi | Hacker News Reader

I also find it interesting that this option would not be available to Cuba if it were more integrated economically with the rest of the world. The first thing the IMF would force them to get rid of would be high-end public education programs, or at least put them out of reach economically for a large portion of the population.

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The IMF can only "force" countries to do things if those countries want to lend money from them. And even then, a country can lie with impunity in a round - unless it wants repeating lending rounds, and lies in important and bad ways.

Also, I've never hear about the IMF forcing a country to dismantle its public-education programs. When Brazil was on their hook they did anything but that, and in the later years IMF helped improving it.

That seems to have been the general result any time a structural adjustment (or the rebranded, poverty-reduction) program was implemented.

Quite often the IMF is an easy scapegoat. You'd be surprised by how often the IMF advice is ignored or by how sound it can be at times.

For instance, in Ukraine a few years ago, the IMF's advice was to cut down on some structural expenses (gas subsidies mostly) and not to touch investment expenses as doing that would trigger a recession.

For political reasons IMF did the opposite.

What it usually is is political cover for local elites to betray their populations; remove barriers to capital flow and trade, gut environmental and labor protections.

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