title: The Economics of the Democratic Deficit: The Effect of IMF Programs on Inequality
creator: Lang, Valentin
subject: ddc-330
subject: 330 Economics
description: This study investigates the distributional effects of international organizations within their member countries. It addresses the issue empirically by examining the causal effect of International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs on income inequality. Introducing a new instrumental variable for IMF programs, I exploit time variation in the IMF’s liquidity and cross-sectional variation in a country’s probability of having a lending arrangement with the IMF. Using panel data for 155 countries over the 1973–2013 period, the results show that IMF programs substantially increase income inequality in democracies, while having no such effect in non-democracies. The size of this effect on democracies is smaller the more democratized the IMF’s decision-making processes are. These results are consistent with the theory that powerful, ‘democratically deficient’ international organizations that interfere in domestic politics are capable of restricting the responsiveness of democratic governments to the preferences of their citizens.
date: 2016-09
type: Working paper
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/workingPaper
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/21875/1/Lang%202016%20dp617.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00021875
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-218759
identifier:   Lang, Valentin  (2016) The Economics of the Democratic Deficit: The Effect of IMF Programs on Inequality.  [Working paper]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/21875/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng