Quote Originally Posted by Furunculus View Post
no, it is quite clear, the IMF is not obliged to lend to anyone, if you want its money you agree to its terms.
those terms are likely to include reforms that the IMF deem essential to encouraging the growth it beleives will maximise the chance of recieving back both the investment and interest.
a country doesn't have to accept those terms, it can say "no", in which case the IMF will say "no" too.
That is a very simplistic view -- please, do not think I am implying you are simple in any way, I am merely stating that your opinion is perhaps uninformed, and thus limited. IMF's SAPs and their succesors, the PSRPs, are questioned even by IMF insiders; e.g. see this internal document:
The Effect of IMF and World Bank programmes on poverty which concludes that "the poor are better off without structural adjustment".

I glanced through this report I had bookmarked a while ago, wanting to extract a few cliff-notes for you, yet I find it rather difficult to do it while regaling you with the full picture it depicts, thus I will link it: Structural adjustment, a major cause of poverty. It contains a slew of links towards official documents or articles which further illuminate the issue under discussion.

Do peruse it and give me your views

And if you will allow me a cheap shot, one must never forget that both the IMF and the World Bank are institutions under the control of the G7, and while I am one of the least inclined persons to view these two institutions as mere economic instruments subservient to political pressure and I personally think part of their policies have indeed helped, it should be noted that managers in both organizations have been known to put national interests above those of their clients while in office. The cheap shot was me indulging in a bit of pitchfork-waving by quoting Larry Summers' view shared in an internal memo (then Chief Economist for the World Bank, then US Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration etc.):

Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of dirty industries to the LDCs [less developed countries]?… The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that… Under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City… The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under-five mortality is 200 per thousand.
— Lawrence Summers, Let them eat pollution, The Economist, February 8, 1992.