Dr. Donal Donovan:

This is a very tricky area. IMF staff do not, nor can they, work in a vacuum.

They are not just purely technocrats who are not aware of what judgments are being made, what weights people put on risk occurring and catastrophes happening or not, as the case may be. It would be unusual, let me put it this way, for the IMF report to say that a country is doing very well and then for that report to go to the executive board and for many directors at the board to say, "No, no, the IMF is completely wrong. That country is doing very badly". Alternatively, it would be difficult for the IMF to say that everything is going very badly and the board to say, "No, no. The staff is completely exaggerating the risks and costs. They do not understand. It is going very well." There is a certain - I am not saying "convergence" - way in which the views of board members can and probably should influence to some extent, albeit perhaps somewhat subconsciously, what the staff will write. There are no instructions from the board, there is no question of censorship, but we are all human beings and we get a line of what the general line of thinking is on a country, and that has to exert some subtle influence.

There are often differences of view on the board on a particular case and the staff have to navigate a way through those different views. The staff would have different views among each other. Sometimes, analytical issues and possibilities are discussed quite openly, but when it comes to the final nuanced judgment - adjectives often matter because adjectives are what get reported in the media - some of the sentences in those reports are very subtle.