How Much has the IMF Changed in Response to the Global Crisis?

Matías Vernengo

Following the 2008 Global Crisis the notion that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has moved away from orthodox views on a range of issues, but particularly regarding the need for austerity, has been pervasive. For example, Paul Krugman has argued, in his influential blog, that Olivier Blanchard, IMF’s director of research (or economic counselor) is “helping make at least one international institution less austerity-mad than the others.”

So what is this new view, exposed by Blanchard? For example, in the preface to the last World Economic Outlook, Blanchard tells us that:

Potential growth in many advanced economies is very low. This is bad on its own, but it also makes fiscal adjustment more difficult. In this context, measures to increase potential growth are becoming more important—from rethinking the shape of labor market institutions, to increasing competition and productivity in a number of nontradables sectors, to rethinking the size of the government, to examining the role of public investment.

Note that in neoclassical (or mainstream) economics speak, potential growth is supply-side determined. That’s why the reforms would be less regulation of labor markets (to allow firms to hire workers for a lower wage), reduced regulation (to generate incentives for firm entry to increase competition), and reduced size of the public sector (that’s what “rethinking” means; nudge, nudge, wink, wink). These policies are needed to boost the supply capacity of the economy, its “potential” or “natural” output. Demand expansion, in the form of more spending and fiscal deficits cannot be pursued, since the growth of potential output is “very low.”

These are, in fact, the same neoliberal reforms that the IMF has always supported, and that since the 1990s have been referred to as the Washington Consensus.

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Ask Mark Blyth: "Austerity Doesn’t Work, Period"

Kevin Gallagher

“Austerity doesn’t work. Period.” This quote is the punch line of Mark Blyth’s Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, second edition just out. If that quote was made into bumper stickers and t-shirts it would have been icing on the cake for what was an amazingly well placed and marketed book. As just about every review in the popular press has noted, Blyth’s book is well researched, accessible to a broad array of readers, and right.

For academics and critical thinkers however, there is more to it than that. This is not only a book where an established academic engages with a broader audience and “gives” that audience the tools to understand a contemporary problem. Blyth should be praised for that in and of itself. During this crisis and many others most academics have not been bold enough or too dis-incentivized to enter the fray beyond the water cooler. But Blyth also makes key contributions to the academic literature in international political economy as well. Blyth shows how and why the idea of austerity keeps on living in our politics.

The book starts with an accessible discussion of how the crises in the U.S. and EU were banking crises, not the sovereign debt crises (especially in the European case) that they and their aftermath have been described of in the financial press and media. In two crisp chapters, he shows how banks created the messes in the United States and in Europe—and how government debt became a big issue only after governments bailed out and propped up banks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ask Mark Blyth: “Austerity Doesn’t Work, Period”

Kevin Gallagher

“Austerity doesn’t work. Period.” This quote is the punch line of Mark Blyth’s Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, second edition just out. If that quote was made into bumper stickers and t-shirts it would have been icing on the cake for what was an amazingly well placed and marketed book. As just about every review in the popular press has noted, Blyth’s book is well researched, accessible to a broad array of readers, and right.

For academics and critical thinkers however, there is more to it than that. This is not only a book where an established academic engages with a broader audience and “gives” that audience the tools to understand a contemporary problem. Blyth should be praised for that in and of itself. During this crisis and many others most academics have not been bold enough or too dis-incentivized to enter the fray beyond the water cooler. But Blyth also makes key contributions to the academic literature in international political economy as well. Blyth shows how and why the idea of austerity keeps on living in our politics.

The book starts with an accessible discussion of how the crises in the U.S. and EU were banking crises, not the sovereign debt crises (especially in the European case) that they and their aftermath have been described of in the financial press and media. In two crisp chapters, he shows how banks created the messes in the United States and in Europe—and how government debt became a big issue only after governments bailed out and propped up banks.

Read the rest of this entry »