The Hindu Business Line : <I>Hats off, IMF! </I>

If a competition were to be held to adjudge which of the international organisations has the most admirable grasp of the obvious, the prize will easily go to the IMF. If you doubt the decision, you should read the contents of the papers coming out in a steady stream under the common title Straight Talk, designed so as not to unduly strain the intellectual faculties of a college sophomore.

Apart from it, there are more pretentious writings by consultants replete with a number of esoteric and undecipherable equations neatly arranged one below the other. Exercising the same penchant for the obvious, one notes that the high-flying professionals enjoying tax-free income have also plenty of time to dish out stuff that is bound to fly over the heads of even the Executive Directors on the Board, leave alone the policy-makers of the 184 member-countries.

The latest to come out of the IMF paper mill is the queasy quest in 50 pages, again packed with equations brimming with Greek alphabet, for an answer to the question: "Can Budget institutions counteract political indiscipline?" More simply, is it possible for monetary and fiscal advisers to keep under leash runaway political profligates running governments? Or, put more concretely, can a central bank or a Finance Ministry stop the squandering of tax-payers' money by the political executive in the form of unjustifiable freebies or ever-burgeoning subsidies with gay abandon?

I can see you are tensed up for the answer: Well, it is NO! Only, the IMF paper churns it out in 2,000 words, the simplest of them to understand being: "Greater democratic participation is accommodated by increased budgetary indiscipline...The contemporary practice of democracy can increase budget deficits through not only ideological preferences but also more fragmented government coalitions and higher voter participation." What a revolutionary finding after 50 pages and 30 equations! Hats off, IMF!

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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