> IMF encourages debtor countries to decrease imports
> and increase exports (devalue currency, produce for
> export, etc). This might work in an individual case,
> but it would seem to be stupid when prescribed
> globally (who is going to import???) What would an
> IMF economist reply to such a criticism?
They'd say, to paraphrase Thatcher, there's no such thing as the global -- or words to that effect. Put more precisely, capital inflows from incredibly wise, far-sighted First World capitalists are supposed to finance Third World development (this is why the IMF is big on deregulation of domestic finance). In reality, this promptly leads to local comprador elites parking their loot in Swiss bank acounts, while global finance capital gets to outsource production to slave-labor camps in rural Indonesia, until the whole house of credit cards comes tumbling down in a catastrophic deflationary collapse. And then you get, hey presto, another IMF structural adjustment package, which keeps the cycle going. It's sort of a Satanic parody of the classic business cycle -- market Stalinism, in Boris Kagarlitsky's pungent phrase.
-- Dennis