Can International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending improve natural resource governance in borrowing countries? While most IMF agreements mandate policy reforms in exchange for financial support, compliance with these reforms is mixed at best. The natural resource sector should be no exception. After all, resource windfalls enable short-term increases in discretionary spending, and office-seeking politicians are often unwilling to forgo this discretion by reforming the oil, gas, or mining sector. I investigate how and when borrowers go against their political interests and establish natural resource funds—a tool often promoted by the IMF—in the wake of a loan agreement. Using text analysis, statistical models, and qualitative evidence from natural resource policy and IMF conditionality for 74 countries between 1980 and 2019, I show that borrowers under an IMF agreement are more likely to create or regulate a resource fund, particularly if the agreement includes binding conditions that highlight the salience of natural resource reforms. This study contributes to extant research by proposing a new method to extract information from IMF conditions, by introducing a novel dataset on country-level natural resource policy, and by identifying under what circumstances international reform efforts can help combat the resource curse.

中文翻译：

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检查国际货币基金组织条件对自然资源政策的影响

国际货币基金组织 (IMF) 的贷款能否改善借款国的自然资源治理？虽然大多数 IMF 协议都要求进行政策改革以换取财政支持，但对这些改革的遵守情况充其量是好坏参半。自然资源部门也不例外。毕竟，资源方面的意外收获可以在短期内增加可自由支配的支出，而谋求公职的政客往往不愿意通过改革石油、天然气或采矿业来放弃这种自由支配权。我调查了借款人如何以及何时在贷款协议达成后违背他们的政治利益并建立自然资源基金——国际货币基金组织经常推广的一种工具。使用 1980 年至 2019 年间 74 个国家的自然资源政策和国际货币基金组织贷款条件的文本分析、统计模型和定性证据，我表明，根据 IMF 协议，借款人更有可能创建或监管资源基金，特别是如果该协议包含强调自然资源改革重要性的约束条件。本研究提出了一种从 IMF 条件中提取信息的新方法，引入了一个关于国家级自然资源政策的新数据集，并确定了在什么情况下国际改革努力可以帮助对抗资源诅咒，从而对现有研究做出了贡献。