UNCOVERED: THE ROLE OF THE IMF IN SHRINKING THE SOCIAL PROTECTION - Case Studies from Tunisia, Jordan and Morocco

This book is being published at a historical moment similar to that in Latin America at the beginning of the foreign debt crisis in the 1980s, when most developing and low-income countries became tied up in foreign loans that initially seemed relatively inexpensive and necessary for development and growth. A decade later, these debts proved to be a heavy burden for Latin American countries, as the disadvantages of working with the IMF and the World Bank became clearer. The global crisis of 2008 then had the effect of pushing the Bretton Woods institutions to conduct important analyses of, and ultimately make revisions to, the Washington Consensus. We find ourselves today at a similar juncture, with foreign debt service burdens increasing in developing and low-income countries. The IMF and the World Bank have adopted a different discourse than that which they espoused in the 1980s and 1990s. This contemporary discourse is grounded in awareness of the ills of inequality of income and of opportunity, and supports imposing international taxes on giant corporations and progressive taxes on the rich. This discourse also ostensibly supports the Sustainable Development Goals and social protection. The book offers three case studies evaluating the main IMF- backed policies under the theme of Social Protection. As far as we could tell, this is the first book to conduct a systematic study of the major disparities between this discourse from the IMF and the IMF’s practice on the ground, and we hope it will be useful to the reader.