Shawn Donnan and Taufan Hidayat – From the perspective of Hansen Kurniawan's cookie shop in Jakarta's Pasar Minggu market, the International Monetary Fund's performance in Indonesia is easy to grade.
Since the men in grey suits landed in the crisis-hit archipelago at the end of 1997 "there hasn't been any positive impact", says the 36-year-old shopkeeper. "We had better conditions before they arrived, during Suharto's time. Now everything is expensive. Gasoline. Electricity. Telephone. All the tariffs have gone up."
Almost six years after Michel Camdessus crossed his arms and a stone-faced President Suharto signed up to an IMF-dictated reform agenda in what became a defining image of Indonesia's often testy relationship with the fund, Mr Kurniawan is far from alone among Indonesians in his contempt.
But he will not have the IMF to blame for much longer. Indonesia, the economy hit hardest by the 1997-98 Asian crisis, is just days away from becoming the last of the region's economies to graduate from its IMF programme.
On Friday the fund's board is expected to approve the final $400 million tranche of a $5 billion, four-year programme. By the end of the month one of the IMF's most uncomfortable and complicated attempts at managing crisis and encouraging reform will have come to a close.
Hubert Neiss, the Austrian economist who headed the IMF's mission during the crisis, argues Indonesia's current macroeconomic stability is proof the fund did its job. "In the end it came out well under the circumstances," he says.
Most other observers also believe Indonesia is ready for its graduation. "Progress [on reform] was always slow – and is slow – and there are a lot of things that haven't been completed yet," says Rick Fischer, who heads Merrill Lynch's office in Jakarta. "But broadly things are moving in the right direction." The Indonesian rupiah and stock market have made strong gains this year. Interest rates and inflation have fallen, Indonesia's foreign exchange reserves now top $35 billion and almost everyone heaps praise on the government's current fiscal discipline.
This year, Jakarta's budget deficit is expected to come in below a forecast 1.9 per cent of gross domestic product.
The government of President Megawati Sukarnoputri has also drawn praise for its "white paper" laying out an ambitious schedule for reform post-IMF.
However, a badly needed increase in foreign direct investment and the 6-7 per cent growth rate needed to absorb the tens of millions of new workers who enter the labour force each year still seem a distant proposition.
Persistent periods of inaction on big reforms, critics point out, remain one of the primary reasons why Indonesia has taken so much longer than its neighbours to graduate.
Questions are still raised over the political will in Jakarta to tackle issues like endemic corruption and over what the World Bank and IMF continue to describe as a fragile judiciary and bloated civil service.
The white paper's implementation remains a key concern for donors and analysts who fear Jakarta's goodwill may evaporate with parliamentary and presidential elections next year.
Some economists say they fear the possibility that rising nationalism will trigger a populist attempt to hijack still-incomplete reforms.
One of the inspirations of that is Rizal Ramli, a former chief economics minister known for his vocal criticism of the fund. He argues that the long-term impact of the IMF's work in Indonesia has been seven to eight years of lost growth. The IMF also, he argues, made the fall of Suharto "bloodier" than need be.
The IMF itself now officially recognises that its early involvement in Indonesia was error-riddled. An internal review published in September found the fund's actions contributed to the 13 per cent fall in GDP in 1998 that made Indonesia the worst-hit of the Asian crisis economies.
"Exceptional circumstances" in Indonesia were largely to blame, the review's authors wrote. But the fund's work, they admitted, was "inadequate in many respects".
Daniel Citrin, the IMF's current lead man on Indonesia, argues that this criticism is partly unfair. Indonesia was the only crisis economy to face a concurrent political meltdown, he points out.
But this fact does little to appease the IMF's critics in Indonesia. As ministers signed Jakarta's last "letter of intent" with the fund this month, they did so to the sound of protests.
The protesters were not the only ones keen to see the fund gone, however. Inside the ageing central bank hall where the signing took place, ministerial aides exchanged simultaneous quips. "We want more IMF! We want more IMF!" one chanted mockingly to another as the ceremony got under way.
[Additional reporting by Taufan Hidayat.]