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Having successfully pulled Greece from the brink last summer and subsequently stabilized the economy, the government of Alexis Tsipras is now discussing with its European partners and the IMF a comprehensive multi-year program that can secure a lasting recovery and make debt sustainable. While discussions continue, there have been some misperceptions about the International Monetary Fund’s views and role in the process. I thought it would be useful to clarify issues.
It is argued that the IMF has made its participation dependent on socially draconian reforms, especially of the pension system. This is not the case. Ultimately a program must add up: the combination of reforms plus debt relief must give us and the international community reasonable assurances that by the end of Greece’s next program, after almost a decade of dependence on European and IMF assistance, Greece will finally be able to stand on its own. This implies an inverse trade-off between ambition of reforms and strength of debt relief—we can certainly support a program with less ambitious reforms, but this will inevitably involve more debt relief.
This said, no amount of pension reforms will make Greece’s debt sustainable without debt relief, and no amount of debt relief will make Greece’s pension system sustainable without pension reforms. Both need to come about. There is no doubt that both Greece and its European partners will face politically difficult decisions in the coming months to arrive at a program that is viable—one that adds up.
[...] assuming that Greece can simply grow out of its debt problem without debt relief—by rapidly transitioning from the lowest to the highest productivity growth within the euro zone—is not credible. Similarly, the very limited success in combating Greece’s notorious tax evasion—to make the well-off pay their fair share—means that pension reforms cannot be avoided by simply assuming higher tax collections in the future. [...]
Could a primary surplus target well below 3½ percent of GDP make the necessary pension reform less demanding? Perhaps, but that would necessitate more debt relief. This is understandably controversial among Greece’s European partners, in part because several of them are required to run similarly high surpluses to preserve debt sustainability, and in part because some of the countries that would be in effect paying for debt relief to Greece are poorer than Greece, paying much less generous pensions to their own people. [...]
The IMF does not want Greece to implement draconian fiscal adjustment in an already severely depressed economy. In fact, we have time and again been the ones arguing for a fiscal adjustment path that is more supportive of recovery in the near term and more realistic in the medium term. We have yet to see a credible plan for how Greece will reach the very ambitious medium-term surplus target that is key to the government’s plans for restoring debt sustainability. This emphasis on credibility is crucial for generating the investor confidence that is critical to Greece’s revival. A plan built on over-optimistic assumptions will soon cause Grexit fears to resurface once again and stifle the investment climate. [...]