What is it about?
The book provides a path-breaking comprehensive analysis of how the IMF approach to fiscal policy has evolved since 2008, and the role played by the IMF in shaping advanced economy policy responses to the global financial crisis (GFC) and the Eurozone crisis. It spells out for the first time how the IMF advocated coordinated global fiscal stimulus, and then made a series of carefully targeted interventions in the ‘growth ‘versus’ austerity’ debate, deploying its intellectual authority and scientific reputation to advocate policies to escape threats of protracted deflation and ‘secular stagnation’.
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Why is it important?
• Provides the first comprehensive analysis of major shifts in IMF fiscal policy thinking in the GFC and Eurozone crises, and the IMF’s role in the politics of austerity. • Advances a constructivist institutionalist explanation of these shifts, combining cutting edge ideational scholarship in international political economy (IPE) and comparative political economy (CPE). • Builds an innovative theory specifying four mechanisms of IMF ideational change - reconciliation, operationalisation, corroboration, and authoritative recognition. • Combines in-depth content analysis of the Fund‘s vast intellectual production with extensive interviews with large numbers of IMF economists and management • Explains how the IMF, in developing distinctive crisis, and crisis legacy narratives, worked to expand room to manoeuvre for certain advanced economy governments. • Addresses two blind-spots in the IMF literature, focusing on surveillance relations with advanced countries not borrowing from the Fund to provide novel insights into Fund authority – its scope and limits and conditions for success. • Penetrates the technocratic, apolitical façade of Fund prescriptive economic discourse to reveal the normative underpinnings (rooted in principles of political economy).
Perspectives
A Staff member once noted that the IMF really means ‘its mostly fiscal’, an allusion to the Fund’s reputation for harsh loan conditionality involving spending cuts, fiscal retrenchment and budget deficit reductions as standard responses to economic difficulties and financial crises. The Fund’s reputation for conformity with one-size-fits-all neo-liberalism and ‘Washington Consensus’–style fiscal and intellectual conservatism belies its ideational innovation and more differentiated prescriptive policy discourse since the crash. This book substantially revises our understanding of the IMF’s economic policy thinking and its effects on the room to manoeuvre enjoyed by governments. It pulls back the veil on the politics of economic ideas both within the IMF and in the IMF’s interactions with major advanced economy governments.
Professor Ben M Clift
University of Warwick
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The IMF and the Politics of Austerity in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis, April 2018, Oxford University Press (OUP),
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198813088.001.0001.
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