As I've said before, the IMF is a creditor and acts very much like a bank. The primary concern that a bank has is your ability to repay the money that you have borrowed, and the surest way to do this is to create a gap between how much you are making and how much you are spending. Thus, the IMF almost always recommends that governments spend less money and tax people more. People have formed so many conspiracies about this, but if you think about it for more than 10 seconds, it's pretty obvious that this is what the IMF would want. On top of this base layer, you have the Washington Consensus, which, amongst other things, prefers limited government enterprise. One of the reasons why this is the case is that government enterprises tend to be run inefficiently, which leads to waste and reduces the gap between spending and revenue. The IMF's primary framework is that when governments spend money, they never make a profit. So, government spending is seen as literally setting money on fire. This framework ascribes profit-making and capital accumulation to the private sector; in other words, they believe the only people who can actually increase the amount of money that any government has available to it are private entrepreneurs starting businesses. This is why the IMF prefers that, instead of the Government spending money, they support the private sector, which creates profit, which they then tax. Many governments disagree with the IMF about this; they think that governments can actually make profitable enterprises. Note that "profitable enterprise" doesn't have to mean that that specific enterprise makes money; for example, building a road doesn't make money, but that doesn't mean it's not profitable. "Profitable enterprise" in the context of a government means, "Does it lead to more tax revenue?" usually as a result of total economic growth. When people tell you that "A public service shouldn't make a profit," they are economically ignorant. If the sum total of public services does not lead to an increase in revenue, you get a budget deficit, and the government must borrow money to continue funding those services; over time, this leads to insolvency, and that's how you end up begging the IMF for scraps. The core difference between African developmental economics and asian developmental economics is the simple fact that when African governments spend money, it rarely leads to a commensurate increase in tax revenue. For example, China has a lot of SOEs, but the tax revenue in dollar terms of China's government has increased by SIXTEEN TIMES since 2000. In that same period, Nigeria's tax revenue only grew by 3.4x. To understand the problem, understand that in that same period, Nigeria's fuel subsidy bill grew 30x. So if your income is growing at 4x every 20 years and your expenses are growing at 30x every 20 years, it doesn't take a genius to figure out where you'll end up. So when the IMF comes and says, "cut the expenses growing 15x per decade and grow your revenue faster than 1.7x per decade," That's what they're gesturing at. So how do the Asians do this? Well, they actually pay attention to tax revenue and GDP growth. There are SOEs, yes, but they don't just fund consumption so they can be popular; they fund things that lead to future increases in government revenue. If you read their plans, you find a strong investment mindset. They're not spending money to make people's lives better today; they're spending money to grow the economy to make people's lives better tomorrow. In fact, here's a direct quote from Xi Jinping: "To promote common prosperity, we cannot engage in 'welfarism.' In the past, high welfare in some populist Latin American countries fostered a group of 'lazy people' who got something for nothing. As a result, their national finances were overwhelmed, and these countries fell into the 'middle income trap' for a long time. Once welfare benefits go up, they cannot come down. It is unsustainable to engage in 'welfarism' that exceeds our capabilities." This is why they actually phase out subsidies on target. China starts and phases out hundreds of targeted subsidies per decade well before they start constraining the economy. They let entire sectors die instead of propping them up to make people feel better. And this is not unique to China; the entirety of East Asia did this. Park Chung Hee, for example, literally tied subsidies to performance. Africa barely does this. They open a subsidy channel, let it balloon and rot on patronage, allow bad actors to loot the state dry in the name of helping the people, and only close them when they are literally choking the economy to death, and they can blame the fallout on the World Bank. They let spending go haywire and simply take on more and more debt. They create large welfare programs because "the people are complaining" and never close them, even as it chokes the investment part of the budget and takes on even more debt to finance it. When their national mineral spikes in price, instead of saving the excess, they just pile on more welfare on it and let the entire thing get looted; then when the mineral price drops, the entire economy goes up in flames. This is the key difference between the different developmental models.