The involvement of the Bretton Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, in the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was something of a surprise for these institutions in the sense that they were not well prepared for assisting with the problems of transition and, as a result, their policy advice was often controversial. In the first paper in this issue, Burcu Eke and Ali Kutan examine the effectiveness of IMF stabilization programs in a sample of transition economies using data running from the start of the transition to 2003. They evaluate the programs on the basis of three criteria: recidivism, program completion, and before-and-after performance. The authors' statistical tests suggest that IMF programs appear not to have been effective, but the authors caution that consideration should be given to exogenous factors as well as to the capabilities and policies of the target countries before assigning blame only to the IMF's programs rather than to the countries needing such programs.
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