Governance

The IMF Executive Board Minutes Dataset is a text corpus of the IMF Executive Board’s discussions of individual countries in 1995–2015. It covers 3,111 meetings on 142 low- and middle-income countries, mostly on lending and economic surveillance, with more than 38 million words of comments from Board members. For each meeting, it identifies everyone who attended and gives the full text of each comment from the Board’s minutes, with the speaker’s position, country, and constituency, and whether the comment was a written statement. The codebook explains how the Executive Board works and defines each variable.

At a glance

Coverage
1995–2015; 142 countries
Version
January 2025
Unit of observation
Meeting (meeting-level data) and speech (speech-level data)
Status
Available

Downloads

  • Codebook (IMFMonitor_ExecutiveBoardMinutes_Codebook.pdf)
    PDF · 285 KB · January 2025
    Download
  • Text corpus (IMFMonitor_ExecutiveBoardMinutes.zip)
    Speech-level data (the codebook’s IMFEBM_Speeches_Nov2024_V1.rds): one row per speech, with its full text, speaker, and meeting.
    R data (.rds) in ZIP · 93.6 MB · January 2025
    Download
  • Meeting-level data (IMFMonitor_ExecutiveBoardMeetings.rds)
    The codebook’s IMFEBM_Meeting_Nov2024_V1.rds: one row per meeting, with its date, topic, and country, linked to the speech-level data by meeting_id.
    R data (.rds) · 92 KB · January 2025
    Download

How to cite

Forster, T., Honig, D. & Kentikelenis, A. (2025). Formal governance matters: when, how, and why states act on the IMF Executive Board. Review of International Political Economy. https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2024.2441136

Figures

Stacked bar chart of Executive Board discussions of individual countries each year from 1995 to 2015, divided into lending program, Article IV, and other discussions. There are between 107 and 177 a year, and fewer than 140 a year after 2010. Lending program discussions outnumber Article IV discussions in 18 of the 21 years; over the whole period there are 1,676 lending program, 1,098 Article IV, and 337 other discussions.
Figure 1: Executive Board discussions of individual countries per year, by topic, 1995–2015: 3,111 in all, from the meeting-level data.

Publications using the data

  • Forster, T., Honig, D., & Kentikelenis, A. (2025). Formal governance matters: When, how, and why states act on the IMF Executive Board. Review of International Political Economy, 32(3), 818–846. https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2024.2441136

Version history

January 2025

The codebook and the meeting- and speech-level data were published on Harvard Dataverse in January 2025, with the replication data for Forster, Honig, and Kentikelenis (2025). imfmonitor.org offered the codebook and speech-level data from May 2025.

Current release: its files are under Downloads.