Alexandros Kentikelenis

The US Treasury has put the ongoing IMF Surveillance review at the top of the agenda as they want to stop the Fund’s work on climate. But what’s the IMF’s track record since the 2021 Climate Strategy?

Read more in our new @re-course.org report: bit.ly/IMFsurveillance
🧵1/9

This report makes clear just how deep the hubris of Biden-era climate champions was in proclaiming the IRA various versions of "the largest climate action ever."

The Biden administration never even considered anything on the scale of what China has been doing — both abroad and at home.

🚨 New article in Comparative Political Studies (@cpsjournal.bsky.social)!
After many years of rewarding work, Sam, Vera, and I can finally share findings from Mosul, Iraq on how shared suffering under ISIS shaped support for LGBT+ rights.
🔗 doi.org/10.1177/0010... 1/4

Congrats! It’s a fantastic paper!

Book Launch! Join us for the discussion with @stephofmann.bsky.social, @ninahall.bsky.social, @akentikelenis.bsky.social and @ckreudersonnen.bsky.social online or in Florence on the 21 February for the launch of my book "Global Governance on the Ground". Register here: www.eui.eu/events?id=57...

Thanks a ton!

Formal governance matters: when, how, and why states act on the IMF Executive Board International financial institutions (IFIs) are central actors shaping global development. Scholarship on these institutions’ governance has primarily explored unequal voting rights and informal ch...

All this matters for how we understand multilateralism.

Global North drives the show and pushes for pet agendas, and the state representation structures within int'l orgs is where all this transpires.

✅ Open access article here: doi.org/10.1080/0969...

Do they get what they want?

YES!

The more rich countries push for market liberalization reforms in a developing country's loan, the more likely it is that IMF staff will include such reforms when they revise conditionality.

Importantly, the IMF's powerful Global North shareholders push for this agenda *collectively*, as they refer and support each other all the time during debates.

🇺🇸 (largest shareholder) and 🇬🇧 & 🇫🇷 (major former colonial powers) dominate and drive the discussions!

But what do they actually talk about?

A lot of the discussion focuses on their preferences for opening up markets in the IMF's borrowers: privatizing SOEs, liberalizing labour markets, etc.

We show that it is bilateral economic relations between the speaker and the country-under-discussion that drives commenting patterns.

Thus, Board members properly represent the interests of their appointing states, rather than drinking the Kool-Aid of IMF staff's worldviews.

Then, we examine three questions:

1. What determines Board members' participation in different debates?

2. How do these powerful Board members coordinate?

3. Are they successful in shaping the design of IMF-mandated reforms?

Initially, we study participation in Board meetings and present 2 stylized findings:

- 🇺🇸 speaks the most

- Middle-income countries receive more attention than low-income countries

Neither is surprising, thus a good indicator that our data is capturing something meaningful

Our analysis focuses on the behavior of the IMF's 5 largest shareholders: 🇺🇸🇬🇧🇯🇵🇩🇪🇫🇷

This was purely due to space constraints for the article - stay tuned for more analyses!

Our dataset contains information on 3,111 Board meetings between 1995-2015: we extracted all comments and matched them to the person speaking.

This added up to 38 million words—about 1.8 million words per year!

Better yet, the data is fully accessible online. You can use it! 🎉

We collected thousands of transcripts from the IMF's archives to figure out how Board members behave in debates vis-à-vis developing countries.

These debates are important because the Board has the ultimate authority to approve IMF loans and their mandated policy reforms

States are represented in the boardrooms of international organizations, but what do they do on these boards?

This remains a black box for scholars, as it's generally hard to access the transcripts.

📢 New article: "Formal governance matters: when, how, and why states act on the IMF Executive Board" w/ T Forster
@danhonig.bsky.social in @ripejournal.bsky.social

A nerdy thread about how global governance works.

✅Open access: doi.org/10.1080/0969...

Each for very different reasons, these were my fave books of 2024 📚

Happy new year friends ✨🍻

ps. Emma’s book (on the political economy of care & its value, second most sold in DK last year) will be out in English in Spring 2025. Keep an eye out 🧐

Thanks for creating the list!

Depends on outside options too.

Powerful countries can reach deals outside multilateral settings or set up alternative arrangements (eg AIIB).

For less powerful countries, multilateralism much more important & may even trump domestic distributional concerns, but don’t know of empirical studies

💯! Also, without deep knowledge, where are the good ideas on stuff that can be causally identified gonna come from? Otherwise, debates -even with adv methods- end up incremental & esoteric to subfields.

Wonder how AI is going to change meth training, given chatGPT can write statistical code etc

NEW PAPER: The 2022 fossil fuel price jumps caused an oil and gas profit explosion. We show the US reaped the largest profit increase (USD 275bn) of any country. Big Oil claims this benefits the American people. In fact, 51% went to the richest 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A 🧵

Finance, tariffs, and cars Hello and welcome to the 25th Dispatch. Tim is now in Mexico after visiting Brazil; but this is holiday time, so it’s mostly me (Kate) and a bit of input...

We did it; we sent out a newsletter again!
- A bit on COP finance
- Tariffs and Bessent/Plaza Accord idea from @shahinvallee.bsky.social
- And exactly how the US undermined the IMF, per @akentikelenis.bsky.social

It was. But industrial policy is more than infrastructure financing. What the FT article is referring to is something more structural, transformative and state-led.

But haven’t read the underlying WB reports myself

Interesting take by @shahinvallee.bsky.social. I wish I were that optimistic.

Baker had to convince 4 friendly countries to get Plaza Accord through. Current geopolitical env much more fractious. Plus the expected palace wars within the admin that may undermine any role in int monetary governance

Yeah. The take from IFIs was that industrial policy doesn’t work, and after rich countries started doing it, WB/IMF started saying ‘ind policy will still probably not work, but if it does, it will be in rich and not poor countries’.

Interesting that they were recommending it to China.

Berlin friends: next Tuesday at 4pm I am presenting findings from my new book project at the Freie Universität.

Join us!