The IMF and Gender Equality: a Compendium of Feminist Macroeconomic Critiques OCTOBER 2017
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The IMF and Gender Equality: A Compendium of Feminist Macroeconomic Critiques OCTOBER 2017 The gender dimensions of the IMF’s key fiscal policy advice on resource mobilisation in developing countries The IMF and Gender Equality Abbreviations APMDD Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development ARB Asociación de Recicladores de Bogotá BWP Bretton Woods Project CEDAW Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women CESR Center for Economic and Social Rights FAD Fiscal Affairs Department GEM Gender Equality and Macroeconomics ICESCR International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights IEO International Evaluation Office IFIs International Financial Institutions ILO International Labor Organization IMF International Monetary Fund INESC Instituto de Estudos Socioeconômicos ITUC International Trade Union Confederation LIC Low Income Country MDGs Millennium Development Goals SMSEs small and medium sized enterprises ODA Overseas Development Aid OECD Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development PWDs Persons with Disabilities SDGs Sustainable Development Goals TA Technical Assistance UN United Nations UNDP United Nations Development Programme VAT Value Added Tax VAWG Violence against Women and Girls WHO World Health Organization WIEGO Women in Informal Employment, Globalizing and Organizing WILPF Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Publisher: Bretton Woods Project October 2017 Copyright notice: This text may be freely used providing the source is credited 2 The IMF and Gender Equality Table of Contents Abbreviations 2 Executive summary 5 Acknowledgements 6 I. Positioning women’s rights and gender equality in the macroeconomic policy environment Emma Bürgisser and Sargon Nissan Bretton Woods Project 9 II. The gender dimensions of the IMF’s key fiscal policy advice on resource mobilisation in developing countries Mae Buenaventura and Claire Miranda Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development 16 III. The gendered costs of austerity: Assessing the IMF’s role in budget cuts which threaten women’s rights Kate Donald and Nicholas Lusiani Center for Economic and Social Rights 31 IV. Turning a blind eye to women in the informal economy Martha Alter Chen and Rachel Moussié Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing 45 V. The IMF’s role in creating an enabling macroeconomic environment for women’s rights and gender equality Emma Bürgisser Bretton Woods Project 58 This work is part of the Gender Equality and Macroeconomics (GEM) project, a collaborative effort between the Bretton Woods Project (BWP) and the Gender and Development Network, which aims to expose and challenge the way current macroeconomics policies, particularly those promoted by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, undermine gender equality. Working with allies globally, the GEM project encourages economic decision-makers to promote alternative gender-just policies. BWP is an NGO watchdog of the IMF and World Bank and focuses on these institutions to challenge their power and open space for civil society and social movements to contribute to the development of policies that are gender transformative, equitable, environmentally sustainable and consistent with international human rights norms. We do this because the Bank and Fund remain global opinion formers, funders and influential proponents and enforcers of economic and development policies. © Albert Gonzalez Farran/UNAMID © Albert Gonzalez Cover photo: A woman helps her child to wash hands before eating in Tawila, North Darfur 3 The IMF and Gender Equality Trocaire © Athanasie Nirere (36), sells beans, locally grown rice, and salt in Rwanda 4 The IMF and Gender Equality Executive summary As a member of the UN system, the International Monetary impacts of conventional IMF policy advice on women’s rights Fund (IMF) has made commitments to support the Sustainable and gender equality and concrete recommendations made Development Goals (SDGs), including to “deepen gender to ensure that the IMF’s growing interest in ensuring gender inclusion” in pursuit of SDG 5. More recently, the IMF has started equality is reflected in its impacts on the ground. to explore gender and income inequality as “emerging issues” and to develop explicitly gendered policy advice. In a recent While by no means comprehensive, this volume aims letter to an UN independent expert, the IMF even claimed to to examine some of the most commonly-prescribed “indirectly promote human rights” by explicitly citing its work on macroeconomic policies of the IMF and their potential impacts gender equality and its Managing Director’s participation in the on women’s rights and gender equality so as to contribute to UN High Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment as civil society’s understanding of these issues. “key examples in this regard”. Some in civil society have called this shift towards a more open understanding of the social Chapter II by Mae Buenaventura and Claire Miranda of the dimensions of macroeconomic policy an “IMF Spring”, calling Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD) for its protection and hoping it will lead to transformative explores the gender dimensions of the IMF’s key fiscal policy policy outcomes. However, asking for recognition for taking advice on domestic resource mobilisation in developing a more progressive policy stance must be paired with taking countries, focusing in particular on the Value Added Tax (VAT). responsibility and being held accountable for the ways in which the IMF may be undermining countries’ abilities to achieve Chapter III by Kate Donald and Nicholas Lusiani of the Center women’s rights and gender equality as well. for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) focuses on expenditure policy, the other side of the fiscal policy coin. Their contribution The authors of this volume contend that the true fulfilment of addresses the role of the IMF in the defining macroeconomic women’s rights and the achievement of substantive gender policy approach of our era: austerity. It assesses the cost of this equality, as well as a more equal society for all, begin with policy approach to women’s rights and discusses alternative tackling structural, intersectional barriers faced by women, approaches. making macroeconomic policy a crucial arena where systemic inequalities are entrenched and therefore where truly Martha Alter Chen and Rachel Moussié of Women in Informal transformative policies and programmes can uproot these Employment, Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) contributed disparities. Chapter IV on the IMF’s approach to labour market policies and its impacts on women in the informal economy in the Global As the standard bearer and imposer of macroeconomic South. This chapter also examines the Fund’s recent efforts at orthodoxy, the IMF is a key shaper of the rules of the global increasing female labour force participation and details the economic playing field, and therefore a key player in realising an inadequacies of this approach. enabling macroeconomic environment for women’s rights and gender equality. While the Fund’s new focus on emerging issues Though each tackles an individual policy area, the authors of such as gender and income equality represents a significant this volume argue that it is particularly the cumulative impact shift away from its traditional narrow approach, this work is still of the combination of these policies that is so detrimental in its infancy and has not affected the bulk of the Fund’s policy to women’s rights and gender equality, and mitigating advice. Critically, its continued approach to what it considers and addressing each of these individual policy measures in non-gender specific policies often contradict its efforts to specific ways misses the point. The volume also attempts to support SDG 5 and women’s rights generally. demonstrate that the overall global macroeconomic framework supported by policies developed and disseminated by the IMF Thus, in pursuing an enabling macroeconomic environment is systematically biased against women. The volume therefore for women’s rights and gender equality, the foremost asserts that only radical, structural change will address that. question should be how current conventional approaches to macroeconomic policy within the IMF impact women’s lives, In that regard, while each individual chapter has endeavoured rather than focusing on how to improve this still relatively to suggest concrete policy alternatives and solutions relating limited field of explicit macroeconomic gender work. Now to their policy themes, this volume closes with a set of policy that the IMF, including its board, recognises that at least recommendations to the IMF aimed at creating an enabling some elements of gender equality are relevant to fulfilling its macroeconomic environment for women’s rights and gender mandate, comprehensive analyses must be conducted on the equality. 5 The IMF and Gender Equality Acknowledgements Authors Mae Buenaventura Kate Donald Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD) Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) Mae Buenaventura is Deputy Coordinator of the Asian Peoples’ Kate Donald is the Director of the Human Rights in Development Movement on Debt and Development, a regional alliance Program of CESR, which she joined in 2014. Previously, Kate focused on climate finance, fiscal policy and the right to worked as Adviser to the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme essential services and natural resources. She works on the Poverty and Human