“Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” Joe Biden said in a 2020 campaign interview while pledging to greatly scale up public investment. The comment was striking as the University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman represents a branch of economics, the Chicago School, that has dominated fiscal policy in Washington for the last four decades.
Yes, but apparently the new policy stops at the US border
Read the article in The Progressive Magazine
ActionAid’s report ‘Fifty Years of Failure: the IMF, Debt and Austerity in Africa’ is based on new research and powerful personal testimonies from across 10 African countries. It is timed to coincide with the first IMF / World Bank Annual meeting to be held in Africa for 50 years. The report documents how the IMF imposes austerity policies, undermining health, education and wider development across the continent. Rather than seek systemic solutions to the mounting debt crisis in Africa, and rather than exploring obvious alternatives such as progressive tax reforms, the IMF continues to enforce cuts to public spending that hurt women and disadvantaged groups most acutely.
Fifty Years of Failure: The IMF, Debt and Austerity in Africa | ActionAid International
Read the analysis of the Bretton Woods Project
At long last, the International Monetary Fund has begun to recognize that the best way to reduce sovereign debt is by boosting economic growth, rather than insisting on fiscal retrenchment. But this new understanding is being undermined by a lingering adherence to growth-inhibiting austerity policies.
Schizophrenia at the IMF by Jayati Ghosh – Project Syndicate (project-syndicate.org)
The International Monetary Fund has said that it protects spending on education, health and social protection from cuts in its loan programmes through social spending floors. These measures are a welcome step forward, but are they effective?
Analysis of all 17 IMF loan programmes (Extended Credit Facilities, or ECFs, and Extended Fund Facilities, or EFFs) for low- and middle-income countries during the first two years of the pandemic shows that these floors are deeply inadequate, inconsistent, opaque and failing. They are little more than a fig leaf for harmful austerity, which is driving inequality, poverty and suffering.
Read Oxfam‘s Paper
Drawing on the specific case of IMF and World Bank’s response to the multiple crisis triggered by the pandemic, a journal article shows that there is a discourse-practice disjuncture in the Bretton Woods institutions approach to public services as they continue to favour austerity and market-oriented solutions for the delivery of public services. The article therefore seeks to demystify the institutions rhetoric and demand the adoption of a different way of understanding public services, and social policy more broadly.
Read Eurodad’s article
What does Georgieva’s New Year’s message really mean?
Read about it in the article by Matteo Tiratelli
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