The Currency of Confidence by Stephen C Nelson
The IMF is a purposive actor in world politics, primarily driven by a set of homogenous economic ideas, Stephen C. Nelson suggests, and its professional staff emerged from an insular set of American-trained economists. The IMF treats countries differently depending on whether that staff trusts the country's top officials; that trust in turn depends on the educational credentials of the policy team that Fund officials face across the negotiating table. Intellectual differences thus lead to lasting economic effects for the citizens of countries seeking IMF support.Based on deep archival research in IMF archives and personnel files, Nelson argues that the IMF has been the Johnny Appleseed of neoliberalism: neoliberal policymakers sprout and take root in countries that have spent recent decades living under the Fund's conditional lending arrangements. Nelson supports his argument through quantitative measures and illustrates the dynamics of relations between the Fund and client countries in a detailed examination of newly available archives of four periods in Argentina's long and often bitter relations with the IMF. The Currency of Confidence ends with Nelson's examination of how the IMF emerged from the global financial crisis as an unexpected victor.An excellent book that introduces important evidence about the politics of International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending... The book builds a convincing case by combining careful quantitative analysis that establishes the general pattern with thorough qualitative work on Argentina that illustrates his proposed mechanism.
* Review of International Organizations *Stephen C. Nelson is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. In 2010 he won the American Political Science Award's Helen Dwight Reid Award for best dissertation in the field of international relations.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781501705120 |
| ISBN 10 | 1501705121 |
| Title | The Currency of Confidence |
| Author | Stephen C Nelson |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Cornell University Press |
| Year published | 2017-02-07 |
| Number of pages | 248 |
| Prizes | Winner of Peter Katzenstein Book Prize 2020 (United States) |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |