Empirical Evidence
There is some evidence that IMF stabilization programs do have a positive impact on the balance of payments and the current account.(Citation needed) However, evidence for reductions in inflation, and encouragement of growth, is rather limited and questionable. (citation needed) The case of Argentina' structural adjustments caused an augmentation of inequality and poverty.
There are some serious problems in measuring the empirical success of Fund programs. It is extremely difficult to calculate the counterfactual; that is, what would have happened had the Fund not intervened. Indeed, the 'before and after' evidence of success in the balance of payments is weaker than calculations of success relative to the counterfactual.
Read more about this topic: Structural Adjustment
Famous quotes containing the words empirical and/or evidence:
“To develop an empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth only about the empirical world, about what is actual and observable.... It must involve throughout a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature, by means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable, as a demand which plays no role in the scientific enterprise.”
—Bas Van Fraassen (b. 1941)
“Washington has seldom seen so numerous, so industrious or so insidious a lobby. There is every evidence that money without limit is being spent to sustain this lobby.... I know that in this I am speaking for the members of the two houses, who would rejoice as much as I would to be released from this unbearable situation.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)