Adding insult to injury: the World Bank and IMF's current legacy in Serbia http://bankwatch.org/publications/mail.shtml?x=2219118#serbia

The IMF prescriptions for Serbia that featured in three weeks of negotiations with the country's top decision-makers in February 2010 were in fact highly familiar extracts from the Fund's conventional playbook that have proved to be so deeply unpopular in many countries around the world in previous decades:privatisation, the reduction of pensions and the number of pensioners, the raising of the age for pension provision, a low single digit inflation rate, the stabilisation of the exchange rate, and the freezing of salaries in the public sector with significant cuts in the number of public sector employees.

The upshot was a period of uncertainty and stress for millions of people living on the edge of or below the poverty line, for the 1.6 million pensioners and 800,000 people working in the public sector with precious few assurances that these measures will stave off the further economic and social demise of Serbia.

Yet the backlash is mostly felt by these members of the public, viewed as reform-shy laggards by the legions of economists and government advisors happy to toe the line insisted on by IMF and World Bank programs. While criticism of popular resistance to these measures comes readily, level-headed analysis of the consequences of IMF policies and World Bank programs from its proponents tends to be all too rare