The International Monetary Fund (IMF) will send staff to Moscow next week to review the Russian economy for the first time since the invasion of Ukraine, in a move that has prompted anger and dismay across European capitals.
Officials of the Washington-based organisation will travel to the Russian capital and meet “stakeholders” before publishing an assessment of the economy and providing recommendations about how the Kremlin might improve its economic handling and tackle issues such as the climate crisis.
The IMF said it was a “mutual obligation” to carry out an article IV review of a member country and the process was only suspended because of the volatility of economic data. The situation in Russia was now “more settled”.
On Friday, nine European countries protested against the IMF’s plans, saying it would damage the reputation of the Washington-based fund to resume dialogue with a country that had invaded another.
“What recommendations does the IMF want to give Russia at the end of the consultation? How to better run a war economy?” one senior eurozone official told Reuters.
Tim Ash, a Russia analyst at the foreign affairs thinktank Chatham House, said in a blogpost: “Clearly while article IV reviews are about surveillance they are also about providing policy advice to countries as to where they are going wrong and trying to provide advice as how to improve their economic outturns.
“Inevitably therefore IMF officials, in making the trip to Moscow, will be helping Russia improve its economy and by so doing will be leaving themselves open to being accused of helping Russia in the conduct of the war against Ukraine.”
Robin Brooks, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said: “A basic requirement for IMF membership is data transparency, which Russia clearly no longer satisfies on a number of fronts.
“Russia has stopped publishing lots of data and there are questions around whether the data it continues to publish are accurate.”
Brooks said the Kremlin was publishing trade figures that showed low income from oil produced in the Urals, even though the price of Russian oil has remained “quite elevated”. It meant the current account, which measures the net effect of trade and financial flows, would disguise the size of Russia’s war chest.
“Russia should be suspended from the IMF while these data questions persist,” he said.
I mean, the IMF could simply recommend peace as an economic fix
Sure, but the bigger issue, as noted from the quotes in my comment, is how can the IMF even do a real evaluation when Russia is almost certainly lying about its economic and trade figures? If the IMF does try to make a statement taking a definitive stance on Russia’s current economy, then we’ll all know the IMF is agreeing to push Russia’s bullshit.
Damn, I for one am absolutely shocked and floored to hear criticism about such fine upstanding institutions as the IMF.
Yeah, not sure what those European countries are afraid of. The IMF will recommend that they privatise their industries, lower taxes for the wealthy and raise the pension age to 80 years.
Just let the IMF do its job and Ukrainians will take Moscow within weeks.
It doesn’t bode well for the Russian people, imo.
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