Conclusion
The IMF must be commended for imposing self-evaluation reports upon itself. They sometimes come on top of reports by the IMF's Independent Evaluation Office (for the report on Greece, see Wyplosz and Sgherri 2016). It is about speaking truth to yourself, which can be delicate because the programme's actors, most of whom are active in the building, have skin in the game.
These reports can fulfil an extremely important role if they identify mistakes that should not be repeated in the future. Does it happen? A previous self-evaluation took place after the first Greek programme. Many of its observations are the same as those of the second report, which is disheartening. The Fund argues that, because the first report was published after the start of the second programme, its conclusions could not be taken on board. It calls for a faster production of the self-evaluation reports. Would that be enough? Scepticism is warranted when we observe that a number of the mistakes reported in this report were already mentioned after the East Asian crisis.
With all its limitations, the fact that self-evaluation occurs and that the report is made public deserves to be commended. The procedure should be a model for the two other Troika institutions, the European Commission and the ECB. Most regrettably, self-evaluation is not part of their institutional culture. They seem to follow the prescription attributed to Napoleon: ”In politics never retreat, never retract, never admit a mistake".