It should on the one hand avoid resulting in families losing their homes where this is not necessary, and on the other avoid creating a perverse incentive for those who can afford to pay their debts to exploit the system at the expense of the rest of society.
However, the IMF’s findings are disputed among economic researchers. The sceptics criticise, first, the small number of observations and, second, the high dependency of the results on the choice of countries in the sample. Furthermore, the situation in the individual countries is likely to vary greatly, but this variation is not sufficiently accounted for in the IMF’s cross-section analysis.