Changing the textbooks? Crisis and aperture at the IMF’s teaching institutes
Ban, Cornel
Using insights from the sociology of knowledge and findings from preliminary empirical probes into IMF research since the Great Recession, this paper aims to propose a new analytical framework for the study of the teaching activities of the IMF’s teaching infrastructure: the
Institute in Washington DC and in two regional centers: the Brazil-based Joint Regional
Training Center for Latin America (BTC) and the Joint Vienna Institute (JVI). How have these
institutes negotiated the “productive incoherence” that marks the Fund’s new stances on fiscal
and financial economics? How have the students in these institutes internalized the conflicts
between the research of IMF staff on these policy areas and the Fund’s official positions in a time
of uncertainty and aperture? If indeed IMF teaching is reflexive, has the BTC teaching
incorporated more dissenting views than the IMF Institute or the JVI, given the more systematic
embrace of heterodox ideas by the policy mainstream of Brazil, BTC’s co-sponsor? To address
these questions this working paper suggests a few recalibrations of the existing literature on the
diffusion of economic ideas via IFIs. To this end, it extracts several new analytical propositions
from the sociology of knowledge.
This repository item contains a working paper from the Boston University Global Economic Governance Initiative. The Global Economic Governance Initiative (GEGI) is a research program of the Center for Finance, Law & Policy, the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, and the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. It was founded in 2008 to advance policy-relevant knowledge about governance for financial stability, human development, and the environment.
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