Upping the ante for political economy analysis of the international financial institutions

Anyone reading about the international financial institutions. (IFIs, principally the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) cannot help but be struck by the wide range of views expressed. This is perhaps not surprising with respect to normative opinions, but almost equally wide is the range of positive assumptions about how these institutions behave and the effects of their policies. Given the difficulties of interpreting the data thrown up by complex social interactions this might be excepted. What is quite alarming, however, in the literature on the IFIs is the frequency with which writers ignore the vast range of disagreement and assume (usually implicitly) that one particular point of view is clearly correct. Thus critics of the IFIs from the far right and the far left have become political allies, seemingly not noticing that each side has reached its position by making exactly opposite (and offsetting) positive and normative assumptions. Thus while the far left sees and opposes the IMF as an agent of global capitalist interests, the far right opposes it instead as an agent of statism. Again we should perhaps not be surprised that political activists pay little attention that their positive analysis is completely at odds with that of those on the opposite end of the political spectrum. When we turn to the academic literature, however, the state of analysis is not all that much better. Many (indeed I suspect most) treatments of the political economy of the IFIs in the academic literature view them through one or at most two lenses, and in the latter case it is often only to contrast the author's correct lens with a conventional wisdom based on some false lens.