Introduction<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The 2026 Annual Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank are taking place in Bangkok, Thailand, amid a deepening crisis of global capitalism, marked by the United States\u2019 (US) strategic decline and its intensifying rivalry with China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The two US-dominated international financial institutions (IFIs) are reasserting their key role in counteracting the falling profit rates of global finance capital and corporations\u2014desperately tightening the US\u2019s losing grip on global economic dominance, forcibly prying open more markets and resources for exploitation, and renewing their endorsement of US wars of aggression. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The IMF-World Bank\u2019s 82 years are a long history of destructive policies that have devastated economies and provoked resistance and outrage worldwide\u2014they should have been shut down long ago. Yet, like battered beasts that refuse to die, they persist to preserve US imperialism and salvage it from its moribund crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scrambling from crisis to crisis<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Understanding the IFIs begins with understanding the machinations of US imperialism as it lurches from crisis to crisis. Major crisis episodes in the 20th<\/sup> century culminated in two world wars, exposing imperialism\u2019s enduring crisis and inability to resolve its inherent contradictions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After the Second World War, the US, emerging as the dominant imperialist power, had to devise new forms of control\u2014first to rehabilitate Europe to contain the spread of Soviet influence, then to confront post-colonial struggles for national liberation sweeping across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Neocolonialism became a central strategy, replacing direct colonial rule with economic, political, and institutional mechanisms of domination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Led by the US, the advanced capitalist countries established the IFIs to impose policies on newly independent states, perpetuating dependencies and creating debt traps. The IMF would be a global monitor of countries\u2019 financial health to ensure a functioning global financial system for imperialism. The World Bank, on the other hand, would finance superficial development, intended to rehabilitate markets to be open and ready to export capital and goods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the 1960s, the IFIs had increasingly turned their attention to the \u201cThird World\u201d, particularly as Europe\u2019s postwar reconstruction advanced, channeling finance into developing economies to expand their capacity to absorb surplus products and capital from the advanced capitalist countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 1970s technological revolution intensified the crisis of overproduction, leading to an unprecedented debt crisis the following decade. In the 1980s, the IFIs imposed structural adjustment programs (SAPs), marking the start of neoliberalism and opening economies to foreign investment and products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 1990s further entrenched financialization and debt expansion. The decade saw the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and regional trade blocs, dismantling remaining trade and economic barriers. The decade also saw the reintegration of former socialist states into the global capitalist system, further expanding the market economy and the reach of IMF-World Bank policy impositions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The last two decades have seen more comprehensive neoliberal policies\u2014trade and investment liberalization, privatization, deregulation, debt expansion, austerity, regressive taxation, and financialization \u2014which have led to prolonged economic stagnation and untold human misery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Neoliberalism, a misleading roadmap <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Understanding the IMF-World Bank requires understanding neoliberalism\u2014its role in sustaining the fragile, crisis-ridden global economic system to ensure super-profits, and how it has evolved further in the post-globalization era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The IMF and World Bank have built their legitimacy for more than 80 years by presenting themselves as providers of financial and technical assistance for development, guardians of the global financial system, and institutions committed to poverty reduction. This false legitimacy has persisted through repeated crisis episodes. But the 2008 global financial crisis\u2014perhaps the most consequential crisis of the 21st<\/sup> century and the beginning of a prolonged period of global stagnation and instability\u2014also profoundly undermined the legitimacy of neoliberalism, the very policy framework the IMF-World Bank had championed for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, imperialism is entering a new stage of its deepening crisis, with inter-imperialist rivalry, particularly between the US and China, as the primary contradiction. This stage brings greater financial instability, disrupted global supply chains, and intensifying imperialist wars. A capitalism-induced climate emergency is also on top of this crisis, threatening the very survival of the planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Far from addressing these crises, the IFIs have grown more predatory, increasingly shedding their development pretenses and emerging more nakedly as instruments of imperialist rule. They are openly supporting US aggression as the US struggles to arrest its relative decline and weakening global dominance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The road to ruin<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n One common understanding of the IMF-World Bank centers on their predatory lending. This is less about extraordinarily high interest rates, as theirs are usually below market rates. The predatory character lies in lending to countries already trapped in debt and foreign exchange shortages on the condition that they adopt sweeping policies such as privatization, deregulation, trade and investment liberalization, finance and currency liberalization, cuts in public spending, removal of subsidies, prescriptions in social services, including even how to deal with a pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The policy dictates are interventions that ultimately serve foreign corporations, banks, and investors, along with their local oligarch partners in borrowing countries. New lending not only preserves investor interests and confidence but also helps countries keep servicing earlier debts that were never meant to be repaid, while shifting the economic and social costs of adjustment onto workers, farmers, and poor households.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The IMF-World Bank\u2019s track record is replete with harsh, harmful policies that have destroyed economies, plundered the environment, blocked agrarian reform and rural development, and caused de-industrialization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n De-industrialization<\/u><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As early as the 1960s, the IMF-World Bank had made it a point to put corporate interests first in their agricultural policy recommendations. The World Bank introduced the Green Revolution program across Asia to facilitate the sale of input-dependent, high-yielding rice varieties and the chemical inputs peddled by transnational agricultural corporations. In the Philippines, the program was paired with a credit facility so farmers could afford the higher production costs driven by their growing dependence on chemicals. The Green Revolution was a fiasco\u2014Filipino farmers fell deeper into debt while soil and land quality declined. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Also, as early as the 1960s, the IMF-World Bank had discouraged industrial policy measures that ran counter to economic liberalization. The US and the IMF-World Bank initially supported import-substitution industrialization (ISI) in the 1950s-1960s while postwar reconstruction remained centered on Europe. ISI encouraged countries to source local materials for their industries to substitute for imported inputs. But foreign firms were already deeply entrenched in the neocolonies and benefitted more from ISI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The IMF-World Bank then increasingly promoted export-oriented industrialization (EOI) in the 1970s as import substitution ran into difficulties. EOI opened countries to foreign investment in export industries, presumably to raise capital and earn foreign exchange to propel industrialization. But EOI brought in foreign firms, their capital, and raw materials, and promoted their \u201crights and privileges\u201d to use cheap local labor and eventually export their products. National industrialization remained elusive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Philippines pursued EOI after its own failure with ISI. The Marcos dictatorship formally established the Bataan Export Processing Zone in 1972 with the Export Processing Zone Authority (EPZA) as the framework. EOI subsequently opened up the country as a mere location for foreign industries and eventually decimated local infant industries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What happened to South Korea and Taiwan, which somehow industrialized as if they were seemingly spared from the IMF-World Bank scheme? The IMF-World Bank permitted extensive state intervention in both countries, departing from later neoliberal prescriptions. The IMF-World Bank even backed a US-allied military dictatorship in South Korea. In truth, industrialization in both countries was shaped above all by Cold War strategy: the US saw their rapid development as crucial to containing communism in Asia and supplying the US military-industrial complex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Plunder and puppet regimes<\/u><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The term \u2018development aggression\u2019 gained currency largely because of the destructive World Bank-funded development projects. Some of the prominent cases are the Chico River Dam in the Philippines (1972-1980), Narmada Dam in India (1985-1993), and Pak Mun Dam in Thailand (1990-1994). These projects were eventually stopped by mounting public outrage over the destruction they caused, as well as the killings and human rights violations committed to force them through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The IFIs are also known for supporting dictatorships and puppet regimes just so they could implement the harshest of economic policies. For instance, they backed the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) in Chile as the latter went on a privatization rampage in exchange for substantial IFI loans despite massive human rights violations. The Pinochet regime sold 700 state-owned firms, and the country plunged into deep foreign debt and economic crisis. Still, with IMF-World Bank support, the Pinochet regime bailed out banks and private corporate entities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the 1970s, four of the seven largest loan recipients were US-allied Asian military dictatorships<\/a> during the Cold War: Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey, and the Philippines. The Philippines remains subservient to this day, even though it officially exited an IMF program in 2006.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trail of epic fails<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Iconic failures have long delegitimized neoliberalism, and even the IMF-World Bank could not deny them, though the IFIs could only modify neoliberal prescriptions in response to widespread protests. Still, some countries, such as the Philippines, have long normalized neoliberal prescriptions and continue to follow them even when they are not under any IMF-World Bank program.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Debunking neoliberalism<\/u><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Countries such as Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina<\/strong> were heavily indebted to foreign commercial banks. IMF loans were made conditional on austerity, currency devaluation, wage restraint, and economic liberalization. In Argentina, the 2018 IMF US$57 billion<\/a> loan was rapidly exhausted amid capital flight and debt servicing. The IMF imposed austerity on the population but failed to restore investor confidence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The World Bank required Bolivia<\/a> in 1999 to privatize the La Paz and Cochabamba water utilities. Water rates increased steeply, which set off \u201cWater War\u201d protests. The privatization contract was canceled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The IMF stabilization program in Zambia<\/a> in the 1980s and into the 2000s cut health spending and weakened the country\u2019s ability to control HIV\/AIDS and tuberculosis. During the Asian financial crisis in 1997-1998, Indonesia, Thailand, and South Korea had to accept tight fiscal and monetary policy, bank closures, and structural reforms in return for IMF rescue money. The IMF used a \u201cone-size-fits-all\u201d approach, reusing intrusive, uncompromising prescriptions designed for Latin America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Staying the course<\/u><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Philippines, by contrast, is iconic for being ahead of neoliberalism. The country was among four countries to take a structural adjustment loan in 1979, when SAP, because of its harshness, was still in the experimental stage. The country first borrowed from the World Bank in 1957 (Binga hydroelectric project) and from the IMF in 1962 (a standby arrangement). Fifteen years later, the country was already deep in debt and a candidate for SAP. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Cory Aquino administration reduced tariffs, privatized state corporations, and liberalized foreign investment, implementing measures to narrow the negative list. The Ramos administration carried out a massive privatization program, including infrastructure and water, liberalized the mining industry to 100% foreign investment, and completed the tariff reductions started by the Cory Aquino administration, so that by the time the country joined the WTO, few tariff lines remained to liberalize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Following policy recommendations from IFIs, the Ramos administration deregulated the downstream oil industry. The Arroyo administration, supported by the IMF-World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), privatized the power industry. It allowed private power producers to take over generation plants, pass on their stranded debts to consumers, and freely set electricity rates. It also liberalized the retail trade industry, the remaining frontier for Filipino capitalists, to foreign investment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Noynoy Aquino administration, through its public-private partnership (PPP) program, further liberalized infrastructure development to foreign corporations and the local economic oligarchs. It expanded bank liberalization, allowing full entry for foreign banks, and forged asymmetrical bilateral deals with far more advanced countries, as if WTO agreements were not enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Duterte administration benefited from the already broad scope of neoliberalism. It liberalized rice importation, opened public services to foreign ownership, amended the foreign investment liberalization started by the Cory Aquino administration to further narrow the negative list, and amended further retail trade liberalization to allow 100% foreign ownership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Duterte government increased tax regressivity by broadening the scope of the value-added tax (VAT) and lowering corporate income taxes. The Marcos Jr government later expanded and refined these fiscal incentives for investment, including incentives for export-oriented enterprises, which the IMF commended as a major investment reform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling (SPLIT), a World Bank project started by the Duterte administration, seeks to subdivide collective land titles into individual land titles. It effectively introduces the marketization of agricultural land, allowing farmers to use it as collateral for credit, weakening the farmers\u2019 collective organizations, and further reducing government support for agriculture. The project is pushing for eventual land reconcentration. Yet, the Marcos Jr government has extended its implementation until 2027. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Marcos Jr government has further institutionalized private financing, construction, operation, and management of public infrastructure. It cut the rice import tariff from 35% to 15%, registering the highest rice importation volume in history and further undermining local rice production. It enacted a law allowing qualified foreign investors to lease private lands for up to 99 years, effectively granting nearly century-long control without transferring formal ownership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The country\u2019s economic managers may argue that some of these were not IMF-World Bank policy impositions. But across administrations, policies and programs illustrate the IMF-World Bank’s continuing influence on Philippine economic policymaking even without direct loan conditionalities. In reality, Philippine economic technocrats have long internalized and institutionalized the market-oriented development framework the IFIs promoted. \u201cStay the course\u201d is their mantra, and any departure from it would be politically risky for anyone aspiring to be the next administration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n New turn, same road<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n World Bank lending to the Philippines jumped from US$900 million in 2015-2019 to US$6.5 billion in 2020-2024. Under the Marcos Jr administration, the government has continued to receive the World Bank\u2019s Development Policy Loans (DPLs), which are not earmarked for specific projects but disbursed directly into the government\u2019s budget to support policy and institutional reforms. Instead of conventional loan conditionalities requiring future compliance, DPLs are tied to \u201cprior actions\u201d\u2014policy measures that the borrowing government must undertake before financing is approved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Current DPLs are perhaps the largest Philippine World Bank loans to date\u2014US$1.8 billion each for Energy Transition and Climate Resilience and Growth and Jobs. The former<\/a> supports electricity market reform, renewable energy auctions, private investment in energy and water, and water sector financing reforms including cost-recovery tariffs. The latter<\/a> seeks to improve the business environment through private investment, education and workforce-skills reform, and fiscal resilience with priority spending on infrastructure and so-called human capital. The former advances the World Bank\u2019s new schemes of plunder, while the latter promotes its jobs agenda, geared toward pushing a fake industrial policy and securing only a steady supply of low-wage labor. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, even without an IMF program, the IMF continues its fiscal and financial policy recommendations to the Philippine government. The IMF\u2019s 2025 Article IV mission statement supported the Marcos government\u2019s fiscal consolidation and across-the-board austerity. The IMF\u2019s recommendations included broadening the VAT base, improving revenue collection, and introducing durable tax and expenditure measures. The mission statement listed possible changes to VAT exemptions covering education, health, senior citizens, persons with disabilities, cooperatives, agriculture, and fisheries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The IMF also endorsed financial supervision and regulation, with priority given to combating the financing of terrorism. The country does not have an IMF program, but the IMF continues to name sectors, such as infrastructure, energy, and climate resilience, where structural reforms may be focused to enhance investment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Blazing a new path<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The Trump administration may be seen as abandoning development aid and hollowing out multilateralism, yet the US National Security Strategy explicitly states that it is dedicated to using its leadership position in the IFIs \u201cto implement reforms that ensure that they serve American interests.\u201d The IMF-World Bank continue to operate in such a context: amid growing US militarism, a race for defense-critical minerals and access to cheap labor, and a desperate desire to rearrange global supply chains so the US can gain a technological advantage over China.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The World Bank has backed US war efforts, joining the US-led Board of Peace and setting up the Gaza Reconstruction and Development Fund. It has supported the drive to secure minerals and rare earths critical for military power, energy, and technological dominance. It also promotes policies to favor high-quality investment and economic corridors, alongside an industrial policy and jobs agenda that offer little genuine industrial development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marcos Jr came to power at a critical time, amid a deepening crisis of US imperialism that has further exposed the failures of more than four decades of neoliberalism. Yet, even as the Philippines grapples with its own severe economic crisis, the Marcos Jr administration has failed to chart an independent course. It has remained subservient to US interests, aligning its economic and foreign policies with Washington\u2019s efforts to shore up the US\u2019s declining global dominance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The Marcos government is complicit in the IFI\u2019s new schemes of plunder and debt traps, providing the US defense industrial base with Pax Silica and the Luzon Economic Corridor, opening up the country further for cheap labor exploitation, and supporting US hegemonic interests. And once again, it shifts the burden onto the toiling Filipino people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The long, ruinous trail must end. Through global solidarity, the peoples of the world must blaze a new path toward national industrialization, economic democratization, sovereignty, and genuine development. Imperialism\u2019s treacherous road must end where the people\u2019s own path begins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The IMF-World Bank\u2019s 82 years are a long history of destructive policies that have devastated economies and provoked resistance and outrage worldwide.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":19279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"single-withbanner.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2048,3],"tags":[4512,4510,4511,693,2972,348,4513,1340,126],"class_list":["post-19270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-advocacies","category-banner","category-features","tag-development-policy-loans","tag-imf-world-bank","tag-international-financial-institutions","tag-international-monetary-fund","tag-marcos-jr-administration","tag-neoliberalism","tag-policy-dictates","tag-us-imperialism","tag-world-bank","wpautop"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-10-20 07:36:07","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19270"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19280,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19270\/revisions\/19280"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ibon.org\/tl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}