Legal Reform or Implementation? The Traction of Governance-Related Structural Conditionality in IMF Programs after the 2018 Framework

The International Monetary Fund’s 2018 Framework for Enhanced Fund Engagement on Governance committed the institution to systematic engagement with governance vulnerabilities. Whether the resulting conditions are delivered, and whether delivery depends on what a condition asks a government to do, has not been independently established. Using the Fund’s Monitoring of Fund Arrangements database, this paper analyses 6,227 structural benchmarks attached to 89 arrangements in 59 countries approved after May 2018. Conditions are classified as governance-related by mapping the Fund’s own economic descriptors onto the six state functions named in the Framework, and as legal-adoption or operational by coded analysis of condition text. The Framework-based mapping identifies 2,775 governance conditions where the database’s anti-corruption descriptor alone identifies 382, confirming that descriptor-based identification substantially understates governance conditionality. Governance conditions are less likely to be implemented than others (odds ratio 0.74 on time, 0.70 including delay). Legal-adoption conditions are met on time in 47.1 per cent of cases against 66.9 per cent for operational conditions, but the gap closes once delayed completion is counted, and the governance-by-type interaction is null. Contrary to the capability-trap expectation, legislative conditions are not more readily delivered than administrative ones; they are delivered late.