A Thousand Cuts: Social Protection in the Age of Austerity

The dominant policy response to economic crises over the past four decades has been the introduction of austerity--a mix of budget cuts and reforms to downsize the role of the state.The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been the world's lender of last resort and leading advocate of austerity, and has been consistently chastised by policymakers and civil society for the consequences of its economic policy reforms on social protection.Critics of the IMF have identified so-called structural adjustment programs as a key cause of global increases in poverty, widespread disease, and unemployment.In the face of such criticisms, the IMF has advanced a narrative of wholesale reform to its practices.In A Thousand Cuts, Alexandros Kentikelenis and Thomas Stubbs provide a systematic and comprehensive analysis of IMF policies around the world.Based on novel data from the IMF archives, Kentikelenis and Stubbs have generated a replicable database of all IMF-mandated reforms from 1980-2019 to exam