Devaluation: A Critical Appraisal of IMF’s Policy Prescriptions
批判性分析国际货币基金组织将货币贬值作为稳定政策工具的做法，指出其政策建议常基于不同甚至矛盾的理论依据，质疑其有效性。
It is by now well understood that the use of the extended facility of the Fund or approval for standby loans involve the undertaking of comprehensive programs of adjustment that include policies... required to correct structural imbalances... . Even after the Fund's internal review of its guidelines on conditionality in March 1979, approval of standby agreements almost always requires severe tightening of expenditures through contractionary fiscal and monetary policy measures such as the imposition of ceilings on net government borrowing and/or net domestic assets of the central bank, or an upward adjustment of nominal interest rates in those cases where rates are fixed by the government. Approval also involves an with the Fund on exchange rate policy and exchange rate arrangements. The understanding usually includes a substantial devaluation of the currency. Devaluation thus becomes part of a restrictive policy package which aims at improving the balance of payments of the country and its foreign exchange reserve position. The advocacy of the same short-run demand-oriented policy package in different countries at different times has created the belief that underlying the policy prescriptions there exists a uniform IMF line of thought and, more importantly for our purposes here, a consistent and uniform analytical model. A cursory review of recent documents and mission reports, however, reveals that often the same policy prescriptions are based on different analytical arguments, some justified and some not, that cast some doubt on the widespread acceptance within the IMF of a particular theoretical structure as a guideline for policy. Thus by 1982, as theoretical advances in macroeconomics and international finance have cast substantial doubt on the empirical if not theoretical validity of a simplistic monetary approach to the balance of payments, the analytical arguments that are used to sustain the traditional policy line have become by necessity murkier and more cumbersome. This is nowhere more clear than in the analysis of exchange rate policy which is the focus of this short paper. The use of exchange rate adjustment as an active policy tool is critically analyzed in the following in terms of its effectiveness as a stabilization policy tool and as a substitute for tax or redistribution policy.