Africa and IMF Conditionality: The Unevenness of Compliance, 1983-2000

Ghana was one of the first African countries to adopt a comprehensive IMF reform program and the one that has sustained adjustment longest. Yet questions of Ghana's compliance-such as to what extent did it comply, how did it manage compliance, what patterns of noncompliance existed, and why?-have not been systematically investigated and remain poorly understood. This book argues that understanding the domestic political environment is key to explaining why compliance, or the lack thereof, occurs. The author maintains that compliance with IMF conditionality in Ghana has had high political costs and thus, noncompliance occurred once the political survival of a regime was at stake. Akonor argues that situations in which Ghana did not comply with IMF conditionality were periods prior to elections and periods of elite conflict/instability, when the governments needed to muster domestic support to stay in power.