BOOK REVIEW 63 Deepak Nayyar ("The IMF Loan and its Conditions") looks at the "conditions" stipulated by the IMF and their implications for the country. With the exception of ''Special Clause" stipulating a ceiling on India's borrowings from the international commercial banking system (more on that later) most other conditions fall into the normal package of IMF "Stabilization .Policies". What these policies have meant for a wide range of borrowing countries is excellently documented in Cheryl Payer's pioneering study of the IMF.1 According to Nayyar these conditions are both in the form of "explicit" binding conditions and explicit or implicit "prescriptions". While it is true that Fund Conditionality has seriously impaired the economic sovereignty and initiative of borrowing countries, Nayyar does not adequately recognize the fact that the ruling leadership in these countries, at least in India, may not be fully averse to many of these policies. Surley the IMF package does not consti-•tute a radical departure from the policies being pursued by the present government since, as we have already argued, such a radical departure had already occured a few years back. Further, whether it -is "IMF staff in Washington" (p 69) or bureaucrats and economists in New Delhi who share the Fund-Bank ideology or in fact are its employees on leave who decide what is good for us is not as important an issue as the class nature of the policies that are advocated and implemented. As The Economist has recognized in its survey of the IMF, "Govern ments throughout the developing world.... may be choosing to follow 'IMF policies' without even going to the Fund."2 After listing out the major elements of the "IMF Package", Patnaik examines their "implications" for the economy. Given the emphasis on a tight monetary policy, an upward revision of the price structure, an across-the-board liberalization of a wide varietiy of regulations, a slash down of food sudsidies and perhaps a dose of devaluation, Patnaik argues, ''the logic of the IMF package therefore is such that its net result must be an 'engineered' inflation, an 'engineered' recession and unemployment, a squeeze on money wages and a cut in public expenditure on welfare relief and subsidies on essential consumption items" (p 72). Further, there is bound to be a "strengthening of the multinational companies and the large propertied classes and a regressive shift in the distribution of income" (p 73). An important point made by Patnaik is that the entire IMF strategy is based crucially upon an asaumpition of buoyancy on the export front; while "there is no reason whatsoever to believe that a rapid export growth comes about promptly with the adoption of a 'liberal' regime... there are reasons to believe that despite 'liberalisation' export growth would be neither prompt nor rapid" (p 74). One recent estimate made on rather conservative assumptions of import requirements and price increases, suggests that from 1980-81 to 1987-88 the annual compound rate of growth of volume of real