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ABSTRACT
The Guiding Principles on Human Rights Impact Assessments of Economic Reforms envision a policymaking process based on sound empirical evidence, so that the proportionality and legitimacy of reforms can be ‘properly’ assessed. Implicit in this vision is that methodological tools from economics should be drawn on, and adapted, to project or assess human rights impact. This article argues that biases inherent to these tools must be fully understood and addressed in order to meaningfully assess the human rights impacts of economic policy choices. First, it reviews relevant literature on human rights impact assessment, to give context to some of the methodological issues raised in the Guiding Principles. It then interrogates the claim that impact assessments can advance evidence-based policymaking, unpacking this idea with reference to a frame for advancing a more ‘politically informed’ approach to understanding evidentiary bias. Second, it explores bias in neoclassical economics. It does this by unpacking dominant styles of reasoning and policy devices, concluding that meaningful assessment of rights realisation does not easily fit within this cognitive infrastructure. Finally, it outlines a number of strategies that would help advocates of human rights impact assessments to better navigate the politics of evidence and contest economic orthodoxies.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Allison Corkery is the Director of Strategy and Learning at the Center for Economic and Social Rights. Her work focuses on how to strengthen interdisciplinary human rights research to support more strategic advocacy. She has written extensively about the need to expand human rights research methods in both academic and non-academic publications. Allison holds an MSc in Inequalities and Social Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an LLM from Columbia Law School, and a BA and LLB from the University of New South Wales.
Gilad Isaacs is a founder and co-Director of the Institute for Economic Justice. He is also an economist at the University of Witwatersrand, where he coordinates the National Minimum Wage Research Initiative, and lectures. His research expertise is in financialisation, macroeconomics, and labour markets. Gilad has a PhD and Masters in Economics from SOAS University of London, and aMasters in Political Economy from New York University.
Notes
1 Amartya Sen, On Ethics and Economics (Wiley, 1991), 71.
2 This and the preceding quotations are from Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky, Guiding Principles on Human Rights Impact Assessments of Economic Reforms: Report of the Independent Expert on the Effects of Foreign Debt and Other Related International Financial Obligations on the Full Enjoyment of Human Rights, Particularly Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Report to the Human Rights Council, December 2018 paras 6, 7, 17(2).
3 Ibid., para. 20(4).
4 Gillian MacNaughton, ‘Human Rights Impact Assessment: A Method for Healthy Policymaking’, Health and Human Rights 17, no. 1 (2015): 64.
5 Richard Boele and Christine Crispin, ‘What Direction for Human Rights Impact Assessments?’ Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal 31, no. 2 (2013): 133.
6 Bohoslavsky, Guiding Principles, para. 11(6) and Principle 20.
7 This and previous quotation from Jeremy Perelman, ‘Human Rights, Investment and the Rights-Ification of Development’, in The Future of Economic and Social Rights, ed. Katherine G. Young (2019), 467, 446.
8 Oliver Hudson and Jefferson Nascimento, ‘Human Rights Impact Assessments Must Be Part of Economic Reforms: Interview with Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky’, Sur International Journal on Human Rights 15, no. 27 (2018): 165.
9 Nora Götzmann, ‘Human Rights Impact Assessment of Business Activities: Key Criteria for Establishing a Meaningful Practice’, Business and Human Rights Journal 2, no. 1 (2017): 92–3.
10 See e.g. Center for Economic and Social Rights, ‘Assessing Austerity: Monitoring the Human Rights Impacts of Fiscal Consolidation’, February 2018.
11 Paul Cairney, The Politics of Evidence-Based Policy Making (Springer, 2016), 5.
12 Simon Walker, ‘Human Rights in the Trade and Sustainability Impact Assessment of the EU–Tunisia Free Trade Agreement’, Journal of Human Rights Practice 10, no. 1 (2018): 121.
13 James Harrison, ‘Human Rights Measurement: Reflections on the Current Practice and Future Potential of Human Rights Impact Assessment’, Journal of Human Rights Practice 3, no. 2 (2011): 172.
14 Fabiane Baxewanos and Werner Raza, ‘Human Rights Impact Assessments as a New Tool for Development Policy?’ (ÖFSE, January 2013), 17.
15 Ibid.
16 World Bank, ‘Human Rights Impact Assessments: A Review of the Literature, Differences with Other Forms of Assessments and Relevance for Development’, 1 February 2013, 30, citing Simon Walker, The Future of Human Rights Impact Assessments of Trade Agreements (Intersentia, 2009).
17 Bohoslavsky, Guiding Principles, paras 20(3) and 20(5).
18 Baxewanos and Raza, ‘Human Rights Impact Assessments as a New Tool for Development Policy?’ 17.
19 Bohoslavsky, Guiding Principles, paras 20(4) and 18(6).
20 See e.g. Carmel Williams and Paul Hunt, ‘Neglecting Human Rights: Accountability, Data and Sustainable Development Goal 3’, in The Sustainable Development Goals and Human Rights: A Critical Early Review, ed. Carmel Williams and Inga Winkler (Routledge, 2018).
21 World Bank, ‘Human Rights Impact Assessments’, 31.
22 For a proposed framework for identifying indicators related to the normative standards and principles underpinning states’ obligations regarding fiscal consolidation see Center for Economic and Social Rights, ‘Assessing Austerity’.
23 Harrison, ‘Human Rights Measurement’, 167.
24 Center for Economic and Social Rights, ‘Assessing Austerity’, 35.
25 World Bank, ‘Human Rights Impact Assessments’, 34.
26 Jason Hickel, ‘The True Extent of Global Poverty and Hunger: Questioning the Good News Narrative of the Millennium Development Goals’, Third World Quarterly 37, no. 5 (2016): 758.
27 Alex Cobham, The Uncounted (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2020), 49.
28 Cobham, The Uncounted, 58.
29 See e.g. Bohoslavsky, Guiding Principles, paras 7, 17(1), 18(3).
30 This and the preceding two quotations are from Alan Bond and Jenny Pope, ‘The State of the Art of Impact Assessment in 2012’, Impact Assessment and Project Appraisal 30, no. 1 (2012): 2.
31 Harrison, ‘Human Rights Measurement’, 183.
32 Justin Parkhurst, The Politics of Evidence: From Evidence-Based Policy to the Good Governance of Evidence (Routledge, 2017), 23.
33 Parkhurst, The Politics of Evidence, 24.
34 Ibid., 6.
35 Ibid., 42–3.
36 Bohoslavsky, Guiding Principles, para. 18(4).
37 Ha-Joon Chang in Conversation with Joshua Curtis, ‘History, Law and the Myth of Economic Neutrality’, Series on Economics and Law in Conversation (Laboratory for Advanced Research on the Global Economy, Centre for the Study of Human Rights, LSE, July 2016), http://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/assets/documents/human-rights/HR-SO-3.pdf.
38 Radhika Balakrishnan in Conversation with Joshua Curtis, ‘Advancing Human Rights through Economics’, Series on Economics and Law in Conversation (Laboratory for Advanced Research on the Global Economy, Centre for the Study of Human Rights, LSE, January 2016), http://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/assets/documents/human-rights/HR-SO-5.pdf.
39 Margaret Somers in Conversation with Joshua Curtis, ‘Socially Embedding the Market and the Role of Law’, Series on Economics and Law in Conversation (Laboratory for Advanced Research on the Global Economy, Centre for the Study of Human Rights, LSE, March 2016), http://www.lse.ac.uk/sociology/assets/documents/human-rights/HR-SO-4.pdf.
40 Joshua Curtis, ‘Merging Socio-Economic Rights and Heterodox Economics: Emancipatory and Transformative Potentials’, Series on Economics and Law in Conversation (Laboratory for Advanced Research on the Global Economy, Centre for the Study of Human Rights, LSE, October 2016), 2.
41 Johan Christensen, ‘Economic Knowledge and the Scientization of Policy Advice’, Policy Sciences 51, no. 3 (2018): 293.
42 Daniel Hirschman and Elizabeth Popp Berman, ‘Do Economists Make Policies? On the Political Effects of Economics’, Socio-Economic Review 12, no. 4 (2014): 790, https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwu017 emphasis in original.
43 Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis, From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics, 1 ed. (London; New York: Routledge, 2009).
44 Parkhurst, The Politics of Evidence, 90.
45 Hirschman and Berman, ‘Do Economists Make Policies?’ 799.
46 As feminist economists have stressed, homo economicus is very much a he. See e.g. Martha Fineman and Terence Dougherty, eds., Feminism Confronts Homo Economicus: Gender, Law, and Society, 1 ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).
47 John B. Davis, ‘Individualism’, in Handbook of Economics and Ethics, ed. Jan Peil and Irene van Staveren (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009).
48 Irene van Staveren, ‘Efficiency’, in Handbook of Economics and Ethics, ed. Jan Peil and Irene van Staveren (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009), 107; See also Sen, On Ethics and Economics.
49 Louis Kaplow and Steven Shavell, ‘Fairness Versus Welfare’, Harvard Law Review 114, no. 4 (2001): 1368, https://doi.org/10.2307/1342642.
50 Daniel M. Hausman and Michael S. McPherson, Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy, 2 ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
51 Philip Harvey, ‘Human Rights and Economic Policy Discourse: Taking Economic and Social Rights Seriously’, Columbia Human Rights Law Review 33 (1 January 2002): 421.
52 Harvey, ‘Human Rights and Economic Policy Discourse’.
53 Carlos Rodriquez-Sickert, ‘Homo Economicus’, in Handbook of Economics and Ethics, ed. Jan Peil and Irene van Staveren (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2009), 226.
54 Harvey, ‘Human Rights and Economic Policy Discourse’; Hausman and McPherson, Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy.
55 Kaplow and Shavell, ‘Fairness Versus Welfare’; Hausman and McPherson, Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy, 128–29.
56 Sen, On Ethics and Economics, 33; van Staveren, ‘Efficiency’, 107.
57 Vito Tanzi and Howell Zee, ‘Tax Policy for Emerging Markets Developing Countries’, National Tax Journal 53 (1 March 2000): 305.
58 As van Staveren notes ‘This leads to the conclusion that Pareto efficiency is not really about maximum efficiency, but rather about relative maximum utility, that is total utility constrained by a strong no-harm principle. In other words, Pareto efficiency allows for the wage of resources - land, food or health care - by the affluent’. van Staveren, ‘Efficiency’.
59 Hausman and McPherson, Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy, 144.
60 Ibid.
61 van Staveren, ‘Efficiency’.
62 Such empirical welfare analysis relies on monetary measures of welfare, using incomes and prices. This has its own shortcomings: income is a poor indicator of well-being across different income classes; some valued subjective goods cannot be measured in monetary terms; and monetary compensation is not always possible.
63 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (OUP Oxford, 2001), 62.
64 Fine and Milonakis, From Economics Imperialism to Freakonomics, 280; Sen, On Ethics and Economics, 34.
65 Alan Kirman, ‘General Equilibrium: Problems, Prospects, and Alternatives’, in General Equilibrium, Capital and Macroeconomics: A Key to Recent Controversies in Equilibrium Theory, ed. Fabio Petri and Carl H. Hahn (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004); Carl H. Hahn, ‘On the Notion of Equilibrium in Economics’, Recherches Économiques de Louvain/ Louvain Economic Review 40, no. 4 (1974): 447–68; Frank Ackerman, ‘Still Dead After All These Years: Interpreting the Failure of General Equilibrium Theory’, (working papers, Tufts University, Global Development and Environment Institute, 2000).
66 Margaret Somers in Conversation with Joshua Curtis, ‘Socially Embedding the Market and the Role of Law’, 3.
67 Hausman and McPherson, Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy, 139.
68 An argument made by Kaplow and Shavell, ‘Fairness Versus Welfare’ for example.
69 Hausman and McPherson, Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy, 142, see pages 141–3 for a lengthier and more technical explanation.
70 Hausman and McPherson, Economic Analysis, 143.
71 Parkhurst, The Politics of Evidence, 42–3.
72 Paul Krugman, ‘How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?’ The New York Times, September 6, 2009, sec. Magazine, 1, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazine/06Economic-t.html.
73 Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis, ‘“Useless but True”: Economic Crisis and the Peculiarities of Economic Science’, Historical Materialism 19, no. 2 (2011): 13.
74 Sen, On Ethics and Economics, 79.
75 van Staveren, ‘Efficiency’, 111.
76 Hausman and McPherson, Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy, 152–3.
77 Bohoslavsky, Guiding Principles, para. 20.
78 Baxewanos and Raza, ‘Human Rights Impact Assessments as a New Tool for Development Policy?’ 18.
79 Edward Anderson and Marta Foresti, ‘Assessing Compliance: The Challenges for Economic and Social Rights’, Journal of Human Rights Practice 1, no. 3 (2009): 471.
80 Bohoslavsky, Guiding Principles, para. 20(7).
81 Baxewanos and Raza, ‘Human Rights Impact Assessments as a New Tool for Development Policy?’ 18.
82 For a history, see Lance Taylor, ‘CGE Applications in Development Economics’ (SCEPA working paper, Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA), The New School, 2011), https://ideas.repec.org/p/epa/cepawp/2011-1.html.
83 Catherine MacLeod, ‘Measuring the Impact of a National Minimum Wage’; Servaas Storm and Gilad Isaacs, ‘Modelling the Impact of a National Minimum Wage in South Africa: Are General Equilibrium Models Fit for Purpose?’, Research Brief, National Minimum Wage Research Initiative (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg: CSID, 2016).
84 Storm and Isaacs, ‘Modelling the Impact of a National Minimum Wage in South Africa’
85 Hansjorg Herr and others, ‘The Theoretical Debate About Minimum Wages’, (working papers, Global Labour University, February 2009), http://www.global-labour-university.org/fileadmin/GLU_Working_Papers/GLU_WP_No.6.pdf; Bernhard Boockmann, ‘The Combined Employment Effects of Minimum Wages and Labor Market Regulation – A Meta-Analysis’, IAW Discussion Paper (Institut für Angewandte Wirtschaftsforschung (IAW), 2010), https://ideas.repec.org/p/iaw/iawdip/65.html; Arindrajit Dube, ‘Minimum Wages’, Journal of Economic Literature 49, no. 3 (September 2011): 762–66; John Schmitt, ‘Why Does the Minimum Wage Have No Discernible Effect on Employment?’ (Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2013). Availability Note: Information provided in collaboration with the RePEc Project: http://repec.org; Dale Belman and Paul Wolfson, What Does the Minimum Wage Do? (Kalamazoo, MI: W.E. Upjohn Institute, 2014); Megan Linde Leonard and others, ‘Does the UK Minimum Wage Reduce Employment? A Meta-Regression Analysis’, British Journal of Industrial Relations 52, no. 3 (2014): 499–520; Stijn Broecke and others, ‘The Effect of Minimum Wage on Employment in Emerging Economies: A Literature Review’ (OECD Social, Employment and Migration working papers, OECD Publishing, 2015); Gilad Isaacs, ‘A National Minimum Wage for South Africa’, Summary Report, National Minimum Wage Research Initiative (University of the Witwatersrand, 2016).
86 Asghar Adelzadeh and Cynthia Alvillar, ‘The Impact of a National Minimum Wage on the South Africa Economy’ (working paper series, National Minimum Wage Research Initiative, University of the Witwatersrand, 2016).
87 Isaacs, ‘A National Minimum Wage for South Africa’.
88 CGE models do not unanimously have these conclusions and there is variation over the types of models, the assumptions made, and time and location. Nevertheless, given that we know that these outcomes seldom hold, it is illustrative that a substantial number of CGE models would yield these results.
89 B. Douglas Bernheim and others, ‘Consumption Taxation in a General Equilibrium Model: How Reliable Are Simulation Results?’, in National Saving and Economic Performance, ed. B. Douglas Bernheim and John B. Shoven (University of Chicago Press, 1991), 131–62, https://www.nber.org/chapters/c5990; Keshab Bhattarai and others, ‘The Economic Effects of the Fair Tax: Analysis of Results of a Dynamic CGE Model of the US Economy’, International Economics and Economic Policy 13, no. 3 (1 July 2016): 451–66, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10368-016-0352-4; Dale W. Jorgenson and Kun-Young Yun, ‘Chapter 10 - Taxation, Efficiency and Economic Growth’, in Handbook of Computable General Equilibrium Modeling, ed. Peter B. Dixon and Dale W. Jorgenson, vol. 1, Handbook of Computable General Equilibrium Modeling SET, Vols. 1A and 1B (Elsevier, 2013), 659–741, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-59568-3.00010-9.
90 Lance Taylor and Rudiger von Amin, ‘Modelling the Impact of Trade Liberalisation: A Critique of Computable General Equilibrium Models’, Policy & Practice, 1 July 2006, http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/modelling-the-impact-of-trade-liberalisation-a-critique-of-computable-general-e-112547.
91 Asian Development Bank, Using Macroeconomic Computable General Equilibrium Models for Assessing Poverty Impact of Structural Adjustment Policies (Asian Development Bank, 2004), https://www.adb.org/publications/using-macroeconomic-computable-general-equilibrium-models-assessing-poverty-impact.
92 Lorenzo Maio and others, ‘Computable General Equilibrium Models, Adjustment and the Poor in Africa’, World Development 27 (1 February 1999): 453–70, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-750X(98)00143-0; Shantayanan Devarajan et al., ‘Simple General Equilibrium Modeling’, in Applied Methods for Trade Policy Analysis: A Handbook, ed. Joseph F. Francois and Kenneth A. Reinert (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
93 Sen, On Ethics and Economics, 49.
94 See Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso, 2019).
95 Ha-Joon Chang in Conversation with Joshua Curtis, ‘History, Law and the Myth of Economic Neutrality’, 8.
96 Harvey, ‘Human Rights and Economic Policy Discourse’, 368.
97 Parkhurst, The Politics of Evidence, 76.
98 Bohoslavsky, Guiding Principles, para. 2.
99 Parkhurst, The Politics of Evidence, 71.
100 They note, for example, that efforts directed at trying to stabilise the economcy comes with the ‘risk of disregarding’ human rights obligations, that states need to ‘balance competing priorities and make approriate trade-offs’. Bohoslavsky, Guiding Principles, paras 2(3), 17(6).
101 Perelman, ‘Human Rights, Investment and the Rights-Ification of Development’, 467–68.
102 Curtis, ‘Merging Socio-Economic Rights and Heterodox Economics’, 5–6.
103 Parkhurst, The Politics of Evidence, 108.
104 Bohoslavsky, Guiding Principles, para. 11(6) and Principle 20.
105 Christensen, ‘Economic Knowledge and the Scientization of Policy Advice’, 294.
106 Hirschman and Berman, ‘Do Economists Make Policies?’ 798–99.
107 Olivier De Schutter, ‘Public Budget Analysis for the Realization of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Conceptual Framework and Practical Implementation’, in The Future of Economic and Social Rights, ed. Katherine G. Young (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 585–86.
108 Harvey, ‘Human Rights and Economic Policy Discourse’.
109 Ha-Joon Chang in Conversation with Joshua Curtis, ‘History, Law and the Myth of Economic Neutrality’, 8.
110 Radhika Balakrishnan in Conversation with Joshua Curtis, ‘Advancing Human Rights through Economics’, 3.
111 Jonathan Portes and Howard Reed, ‘The Cumulative Impact of Tax and Welfare Reforms’ (Equality and Human Rights Commission, 2018).
112 Bohoslavsky, Guiding Principles, paras 22(2) and 11(6).
113 Ibid., paras 22(2) and 11(6).
114 Marion Fourcade, ‘Economics: The View from Below’, Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics 154, no. 1 (2018): 5.
115 Dena Freeman, ‘De-Democratisation and Rising Inequality: The Underlying Cause of a Worrying Trend’ (International Inequalities Institute, May 2017), 19–20.
116 Yulia Privalova Krieger and Erna Ribar, ‘Child Rights Impact Assessment of Economic Policies: A Case Study from Bosnia and Herzegovina’, 2008, 32.
117 Ibid., 40–41.
118 Ha-Joon Chang in Conversation with Joshua Curtis, ‘History, Law and the Myth of Economic Neutrality’, 9.
119 Ibid.
120 Parkhurst, The Politics of Evidence, 76.