Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi University, Milan, Italy.
Department of Politics and International Relations, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK.
Global Health. 2024 May 8;20(1):41. doi: 10.1186/s12992-024-01045-9.
Countries in the Global South are currently facing momentous economic and social challenges, including major debt service problems. As in previous periods of global financial instability, a growing number of countries have turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for financial assistance. The organization has a long track-record of advocating for extensive fiscal consolidation-commonly known as 'austerity'-for its borrowers. However, in recent years, the IMF has announced major initiatives for ensuring that its loans support social spending, thus aiding countries in meeting their development targets and the Sustainable Development Goals. To assess this track record, we collected spending data on 21 loans signed in the 2020-2022 period, including from all their periodic reviews up to August 2023.
We find that austerity measures remain a core part of the organization's mandated policies for its borrowers: 15 of the 21 countries studied here experience a decrease in fiscal space over the course of their IMF programs. Against this fiscal backdrop, social spending floors have failed to live up to their promise. There is no streamlined definition of these floors, thus rendering their application haphazard and inconsistent. But even on their own terms, these floors lack ambition: they often do not foresee trajectories of meaningful social spending increases over time, and, when they do, many of these gains are eaten up by soaring inflation. In addition, a third of social spending floors are not implemented-a much lower implementation rate from that for austerity conditions, which the IMF prioritizes. In several instances, where floors are implemented, they are not meaningfully exceeded, thus-in practice-acting as social spending ceilings.
The IMF's lending programs are still heavily focused on austerity, and its strategy on social spending has not represented the sea-change that the organization advertised. At best, social spending floors act as damage control for the painful budget cuts: they are instruments of social amelioration, underpinned by principles of targeted assistance for highly disadvantaged groups. Alternative approaches rooted in principles of universalism can be employed to build up durable and resilient social protection systems.
目前，南方国家正面临巨大的经济和社会挑战，包括严重的偿债问题。与以往全球金融不稳定时期一样，越来越多的国家向国际货币基金组织（IMF）寻求财政援助。该组织长期以来一直主张对其借款国进行广泛的财政整顿——通常称为“紧缩”。然而，近年来，国际货币基金组织宣布了重大举措，以确保其贷款支持社会支出，从而帮助各国实现其发展目标和可持续发展目标。为了评估这一记录，我们收集了 2020-2022 年期间签署的 21 笔贷款的支出数据，包括截至 2023 年 8 月的所有定期审查。
我们发现，紧缩措施仍然是该组织对借款国规定政策的核心部分：在研究的 21 个国家中，有 15 个国家在国际货币基金组织计划期间经历了财政空间的减少。在这种财政背景下，社会支出下限未能兑现其承诺。这些下限没有一个简化的定义，因此其应用是随意和不一致的。但即使按照自己的条件，这些下限也缺乏雄心：它们往往没有预见到随着时间的推移社会支出会有意义地增加，而且，当它们这样做时，许多这些增长都被飙升的通货膨胀所吞噬。此外，三分之一的社会支出下限没有得到执行——这一执行率远低于国际货币基金组织优先考虑的紧缩条件。在几个实施下限的情况下，它们并没有得到实质性的突破，因此——实际上——它们充当了社会支出的上限。
国际货币基金组织的贷款计划仍然高度关注紧缩，其社会支出战略并没有代表该组织宣传的重大转变。在最好的情况下，社会支出下限是对痛苦预算削减的控制：它们是社会改善的工具，以针对高度弱势群体的有针对性援助为基础。基于普遍性原则的替代方法可以用来建立持久和有弹性的社会保护制度。
