Moderator
Tim Kaldas (Tahrir Institute)
Panelists
- Sarah Saadoun (Human Rights Watch)
- Nada Nashaat (Femena)
- Ashina Mitsumi (Action Aid)
- Monique Newiak (IMF)
Sarah: In thinking about the IMF’s impact on the gendered division of labour, it’s important to consider both paid employment and unpaid care work. How do IMF conditionalities impact this? Vast majority of IMF programmes call for cuts to public spending, and also cuts/caps to public sector wages or jobs. Even if not explicit. IMF’s guidance note on operationalising gender strategy acknowledges the cuts can exacerbate gender inequality, yet we see it is routine in programmes. Norms are also found as something that impairs women’s rights. Jordan: women’s female participation rate in the labour market is 13%, one of the lowest in the world, and the IMF explicitly plans to increase that, but 68% of those women are employed in public sector jobs. That IMF programme also plans to contain the public sector wages. The wage gap is much smaller in the public versus private sector. By cutting or capping public wages or allowing sectors to grow, you’re either depriving them of opportunities for employment, or pushing them into the private sector where wages are lower.
This also impacts women’s unpaid care work: erosion in support for health, education, social protection. Cuts to public services affect poorer people, and women are more likely to be part of this group. In Sri Lanka: IMF removing energy subsidies – increasing cost of transportation, fuel etc. This created an increased cost of going to school. On taxation, in the same way women tend to be affected by public service erosion, it is a similar trend. The under taxation of wealth and over taxation of goods and services (regressive) is a way of men being allowed to be taxed less, as they own the majority of the world’s wealth. What does it mean we’re asking women to use their labour to improve economies, but we don’t address the fact they’re doing unpaid care work and also erode the services that allow them to do that work? Reforming employment: paternity leave etc, to spread the burden.
Tim: While some are pressing the IMF to move away from gender, the IMF’s conclusion that gender is macro critical, it is not difficult to miss. Failing to address gender gaps means failing to address objectives.
Nada: If we look at the 2016 IMF Egypt programme, one of the main features was on youth participation. Why did the percentage of women in the labour force decrease? The IMF has the same prescription: cut subsidies, cut the public sector, free the exchange rate. The problem is: the public sector will most affect women. The public sector offers women more rights: labour laws etc. Private sector conditions: working hours, sustainability of earnings. They will also do informal work. According to the Centre for Trade Union and Workers Services, 50% of the informal sector is women, 81% work in agriculture, and they are not protected by labour laws. What happens to the commitment of the IMF loan? Why is there no follow up? We had another loan in 2019, and then another, and they have the same prescription. Not only are their earnings affected, they pay more for seeking hospital care, education etc. The inflation was not compensated for in the earnings of women or poorer classes. Lack of transparency, lack of (government or IMF) evaluation and listening to people on the ground on how conditionalities have to change. If it’s not translated into a direct service that impacts peoples lives, then it doesn’t mean anything. The idea of having a set prescription needs to be cut. The discrimination of women happening now, even when IMF said it’s one of its pillars, we lack around 600,000 teachers – the government isn’t employing them (only contracting), when the government itself announced an opportunity for women and men to enter teaching, they were asked to perform some mandatory workouts, it led to pregnant women being unable to do the workout, poor women with health problems – they were refused to be appointed as teachers. It was direct discrimination.
Tim: Seeing countries like Egypt and Jordan with zero progress on labour force participation despite the conditionalities over past years. Meeting this week: incoherence on fiscal consolidation advice, and the impact on women. Collapse in Egypt of the public sector and women was predictable.
Ashina: We did interviews in six countries, in both rural and urban settings, with healthcare professionals and service users. Majority of respondents were women. Showing how traditional economic metrics fall short of capturing the complexity of gender realities. 84% of teachers across the countries reported a drop in real income over the past five years, reported difficulties in paying rent, food bills etc. 67% of the health workers were struggling to cover school-related costs. Heavier workloads, shortage of essential resources needed to carry out duties. Severe staff shortages in healthcare fields, declining quality of services. Unfair burden on citizens, rising costs causing higher expenditure. Some of the findings: it’s time to end the debt crisis, states need to be able to spend more on their public services, many states are spending more on debt servicing and interest rates than public services. Factoring in metrics beyond GDP growth. More intentionally safeguarding public spending. Impact of the climate crisis.
Tim: These impacts also have a long term and significant impact on economic growth and sustainable recovery. Countries are borrowing to repay the borrowing. I know the Fund has been talking about this: the note, guidance note, fear over the impact of shareholder shifts. This speaks to the core objectives of the Fund. We’ve had this conversation for some time, how is the Fund progressing in measuring the impact of its policies? Want to focus on the Fund’s assessment of its own impact.
Monique: We truly appreciate your criticism, especially when it’s constructive. We are talking about misallocation of labour and talent and human capital, this links to the mandate of the Fund. There’s tons of research to link that to our core. At the same time, we focus on fiscal policy, we can expect that it will affect men and women differently. To truly design a policy that impacts growth, one needs to understand this. It’s often linked to demographic change: critical to take into account to promote the right policies to not only sustain growth but address the right things. Country teams are discussing this: care side we are talking about the stability of public finances and GDP. On impact assessments: we published a paper in December that looks at 150 programmes and the impact on male vs female: labour force participation, health impacts etc. We are comparing countries facing similar macroeconomic difficulties. It is case by case. There is no systematic impact on IMF policies on men versus women, 90% not impacted.
Tim: Given the risk of coming to the US just now, I encourage BWIs to have staff outside of the US to engage with CSOs too. In the December paper, would it not be more helpful to examine specific policy advice and its impact: VAT, cuts to public wages etc? Rather than taking an aggregate of a wider array of tools that often don’t have mandates etc. I think there is a recognition that the recurring programme problem has a lot to do with the unsustainable nature of austerity. The IMF has concluded repeatedly these are macro critical. We haven’t seen enough of an examination of the IMF holding itself accountable on specific policy advice on macro critical issues, so we don’t have countries that have IMF programmes non-stop.
Questions and answers
Farah al Joy: I am a lawyer. In Egypt, what is the government policy on teachers who do fall pregnant? Action Aid, what was the selection criteria of the countries, how much would the debt crisis be mitigated against in the fact of illicit financial flows and corruption?
Farah al Shami (ARI): What do you think of how care work reacts to the world of work? Non standard forms of work?
Mika Polanco (formerly USAID): Care work, unpaid, how do we create – it’s work that people love doing but if it hurts them because they don’t get compensated, do you have thoughts on how to create a political economy where care work can happen and be participated in by men and women and be financially viable?
Nada: They recently introduced 4 months of maternity leave, they are not protected when applying for jobs but they cannot be fired whilst pregnant or on maternity leave.
Ashina: On the selection of countries: we took into account those who had IMF programmes in the last five years, where AA teams had ongoing work on relevant themes. On how the debt crisis squares against illicit financial flows and corruption, countries losing money through illicit financial flows. Seeing African countries coming together to seal loopholes: the UN framework on Tax Cooperation – the money they could be getting from high level individuals etc. Those who are making those efforts are stuck by global rules, it is crucial to support them.
Women’s unpaid care subsidises the global economy, it takes for granted that women will subsidise. It makes it a precarious way of working, and still exploitative of unpaid care work. How to rebuild the social organisation of care. It’s important to value women’s unpaid care work, not sticking to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) terms. If we broaden our understanding of what the economy is for, we can acknowledge how to recognise and redistribute it.
Tim: Perhaps if the Fund could be so intentional about fighting the subsidy of care to austerity as it is on other subsidies, perhaps we could get somewhere.
Sarah: Corruption is of course tremendously important, creating virtuous cycles of paying tax. Sometimes worry that the way corruption is discussed puts a false burden on individual countries. Recently watching the negotiations for the UN Tax Treaty. Negotiating the first two protocols: African countries wanted to focus on illicit financial flows, but European countries were voting it down. Corruption is part of a symbiotic relationship with the Global North. The loss of revenues from comparines being allowed to funnel profits out of countries, African countries paying interest rates of loans extremely high, these are significantly greater in terms of revenue loss than corruption.
On care work and digitalisation: fantasy, digitalisation and labour flexibilisation makes it so that women can just work more.
Tim: Corruption in legal forms; that is, privatisation. Explicit political privilege that has been encouraged through privatisation, tied into economic reform.
Nada: Question on care work, we cannot just think of care work as independent from other realms of the legal structures. Taking into consideration how family laws are drawn, that puts unpaid care work as something that is given and expected from women. As long as the legal structure is not recognising this.
Monique: Understanding distribution impacts is important. What we are doing: looking at the impact of different elements of fiscal policy advice on distribution outcomes on men and women differently. Secondly, to understand conditionality based on evidence. Having this evidence and looking into different conditions and seeing what is driving outcomes. On unpaid care, I completely agree it’s not just about economics – we will be addressing the economic part, our value added is to see what policy packages could be sustainable fiscally. We are on the same page. How to specifically design such care systems: we will be relying on other partners such as the ILO, OECD, World Bank.
Someone from Social Capital Initiative: Public services, how much are the problems measured due to this supply and demand issue? If and when do you project these countries move towards a better direction?
Alison: My question is about the debt crisis. To me it looks like a two way street, it’s not up to one institution. Any examples of what African countries are doing to improve the situation? Sometimes it’s a sad reality that Africa needs to save Africa. To the IMF, what is being done to minimise the harm or damage?
Fiana: Available data: how the Fund defines and identifies gender (though the paper is limited to seven dimensions only), we can’t make claims of having no impact without actual causal analysis, seems to exist in a vacuum in the paper, the Fund’s policies precisely impact gendered divides. Do post crisis gendered disparities evolve differently without an IMF programme? Is the Fund going to commit to the referenced distributional impact assessment processes?
Monique: On causality, I wrote it with two colleagues, it’s exactly what we are trying to do – a causal analysis, to separate these points. A synthetic control method, constructs credible counterfactuals to a country. Finding a match as close as possible economically to that country (from a donor pool) with a similar macroeconomic situation. Seeing how closely these pre-programme situations will match
Sarah: Social spending: when it was approved by the IMF it was said it is macro critical, this is the heart of how we build and recover economies. The shift has been to ‘we recognise some harms so we will mitigate that with social spending floors which are beyond weak and ineffective’. On mission creep: when we start to frame it as charity, it gets phased out, we must phrase it as essential.
Ashina: We’re doing a lot to organise together, facing resistance, and it’s important to us to support what they’re doing to shift the power imbalance in the economy that keeps them trapped in the debt crisis.
