The twenty-one contributions in this book assess the controversy surrounding the Fund and provide judgments about the criteria for Fund lending which should help readers understand and analyze both its ongoing role in smoothing adjustment to international payments imbalances and its currently critical position in responding to the debt crisis.
With single-digit inflation and substantial financial deepening, developing countries are adopting more flexible and forward-looking monetary policy frameworks and ascribing a greater role to policy interest rates and inflation objectives. While some countries have adopted formal inflation targeting regimes, others have developed frameworks with greater target flexibility to accommodate changing money demand, use of policy rates to signal the monetary policy stance, and implicit inflation targets.
This edited collection considers how conditional welfare policies and services are implemented and experienced by a diverse range of welfare service users across a range of UK policy domains including social security, homelessness, migration and criminal justice. The book showcases the insights and findings of a series of distinct, independent studies undertaken by early career researchers associated with the ESRC funded Welfare Conditionality project. Each chapter presents a new empirical analysis of data generated in fieldwork conducted with practitioners charged with interpreting and delivering policy, and welfare service users who are at the sharp end of welfare services shaped by behavioural conditionality.
The accelerated inflation and large payment imbalances that have plagued the world economy in recent years have created new challenges for economic policy. Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund have found themselves operating in a global environment different from that for which they were originally designed, and developing countries have found their aspirations threatened by large increases in their payment deficits. There have been wide disagreements about the most suitable policy responses by developing countries to these problems and about the appropriateness of the stabilization programs favored by the IMF. This book argues that the strong opposition to International Monetary Fund macroeconomics stabilization policies in Africa indicate how difficult and painful it is to put an over-indebted economy on its feet within a short period of time. Contents: Introduction; The Historical Foundation and Theoretical Considerations of the International Monetary Fund: Third World Perspective; The Historical Impact of British Colonial Rule in Nigeria; the Post-Colonial Economy of Nigeria and the National Development Plan; The Origin and Development of the Economic Crisis in Nigeria; the History and Evolution of the IMF, Its Operation and Policy Conditionalities; The IMF, the World Bank and the Sudanese Economy; The International Monetary Fund and the Zambian Debt Problems; African Economic Crisis and the International Monetary Fund Response; The Buhari's Foreign Exchange Regulation: An Alternative to International Monetary Fund Policy Prescriptions; Babangida's Government and the Nature of the International Monetary Fund Involvement in Nigeria; As We See It: Concluding Assessments and Recommendations; Appendix; Bibliography; Index. International Monetary Fund Policy.
Welfare conditionality has become an idea of global significance in recent years. A ‘hot topic’ in North America, Australia, and across Europe, it has been linked to austerity politics, and the rise of foodbanks and destitution. In the Global South, where publicly funded welfare protection systems are often absent, conditional approaches have become a key tool employed by organisations pursuing human development goals. The essence of welfare conditionality lies in requirements for people to behave in prescribed ways in order to access cash benefits or other welfare support. These conditions are typically enforced through benefit ‘sanctions’ of various kinds, reflecting a new vision of ‘welfare’, focused more on promoting ‘pro-social’ behaviour than on protecting people against classic ‘social risks’ like unemployment. This new book in Routledge’s Key Ideas series charts the rise of behavioural conditionality in welfare systems across the globe, its appeal to politicians of Right and Left, and its application to a growing range of social problems. Crucially it explores why, in the context of widespread use of conditional approaches as well as apparently strong public support, both the efficacy and the ethics of welfare conditionality remain so controversial. As such, Welfare Conditionality is essential reading for students, researchers, and commentators in social and public policy, as well as those designing and implementing welfare policies.
Foreign aid has increasingly become subject to political conditionality. In the 1980s some institutions made aid dependent upon the recipient countries' economic policy reforms. Market liberalisation was the primary instrument and objective. In the 1990s such conditionality was brought one step further; aid was now linked to political reforms, affecting recipient countries' governing systems, requiring democracy, human rights and 'good governance'. This volume looks at these developments and considers the conditionality policies of several European aid donors. Such policies are also considered from recipient perspectives, both from the Third World and Russia, and the issue is also considered from a historical perspective.
Political conditionality involves the linking of development aid to certain standards of observance of human rights and (liberal) democracy in recipient countries. Although this may seem to be an innocent policy, it has the potential to bring about a dramatic change in the basic principles of the international system: putting human rights first means putting respect for individuals and rights before respect for the sovereignty of states.
The objective of the book is to evaluate critically the ten principles of the Washington Consensus, which govern the conditionality provisions of the IMF and World Bank, and guide the so-called economic reform in developing countries. The book starts with an overview of the Consensus, followed by a chapter on IMF conditionality and how they are related. Since the Consensus is inherently neoliberal, a chapter is devoted to a critique of the free market doctrine and the concept of economic freedom as seen by free marketeers. The ten principles of the Washington Consensus (referred to as the 'ten commandments') are divided into four groups: fiscal reform, interest and exchange rate policies, liberalization of trade and foreign direct investment, and privatization and deregulation (including property rights).The book is written in the normative tradition of what ought to be, as opposed to the positive tradition of what is. While it may be tempting to describe the work as 'polemic', the underlying issues contain such a significant moral component that pretending to be neutral would be a betrayal of justice and morality. In essence, the arguments put forward in the book are intended to dismantle, discredit and debunk a set of principles that are effectively used to loot developing countries.
Should a citizen’s right to social welfare be contingent on their personal behaviour? Welfare conditionality, linking citizens’ eligibility for social benefits and services to prescribed compulsory responsibilities or behaviours, has become a key component of welfare reform in many nations. This book uses qualitative longitudinal data, from repeat interviews with people subject to compulsion and sanction in their everyday lives, to analyse the effectiveness and ethicality of welfare conditionality in promoting and sustaining behaviour change in the UK. Given the negative outcomes that welfare conditionality routinely triggers, this book calls for the abandonment of these sanctions and reiterates the importance of genuinely supportive policies that promote social security and wider equality.