Financing the World and Its Peoples A Regression Analysis of Sovereign Loans and Their Socioeconomic Effects

Abstract

Since World War II, the global community has depended on a handful of multilateral agencies, governed by numerous treaties and the wills of their member states, to maintain monetary stability across international borders. This thesis seeks to analyze the specific financial instruments and associated lending conditions used by one of these agencies, the International Monetary Fund, and to determine how those instruments affect the macroeconomic health of recipient nations. We will regress various macroeconomic trends within these countries against the years during which loans were disbursed to these nations, eventually concluding that the conditions attached to these loans have had both positive and negative effects on these trends.