The Effect of IMF Programs on Women’s Economic and Political Rights

ABSTRACT

Though much research has been devoted to the socioeconomic and political consequences of International Monetary Fund (IMF) programs for recipient countries, little is known about the impacts of these programs on the level of respect for women’s rights. We postulate that IMF-induced policy reforms of privatization and public spending cuts, and the growing political repression and instability following the implementation of IMF programs, undermine the government’s ability and willingness to protect women’s economic and political rights. To substantiate the theoretical claims, we combine data on women’s political and economic rights with data on IMF programs for the years 1981–2004. Our findings suggest that IMF involvement is likely to deteriorate the level of respect for women’s economic rights while having no discernible effect on women’s political rights. The results further indicate that the effect of these programs is not conditioned by political regime type and economic wealth of recipient countries. One major policy implication of our findings is that the IMF should start to recognize that the conditions attached to lending programs might be implemented at the expense of women’s economic rights and that more explicit protections of women’s rights need to be included in program negotiations.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender equality
• IMF programs
• international financial institutions
• neoliberalism
• women’s rights

Acknowledgments

We thank three anonymous reviewers of International Interactions and Julie Mazzei for helpful comments and suggestions. We also thank Hannah Guess for research help. All remaining errors are our own. On the title page of this article, author names are listed in alphabetical order; both authors contributed equally to the article.

Supplemental data for this article are available in the online appendix on the publisher’s Web site at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03050629.2015.1056343.

Notes

¹ In their study of economic globalization and women’s status, Richards and Gelleny (2007) control for the impact of multiple international financial institution (IFI) programs (IMF and the World Bank) on women’s rights and show no statistical effect of the IFIs variable on women’s rights. They do not, however, specifically examine the impact of IMF programs. Also, their data analysis does not account for the possible selection effects resulting from the types of countries that are more likely to enter into IMF arrangements.

² None of this is to suggest that states have no agency in negotiating IMF programs. As noted by Nooruddin and Simmons (2006), states make decisions about which reforms they will agree to.

³ In contrast, Eriksen and De Soysa (2009) and De Soysa and Vadlammanati (2013) each use a measure of market liberalizing reforms and find a positive association between reforms toward freer markets with regard to government respect for human rights. However, the measure of human rights in both articles looks at physical integrity rights violations (for example, extrajudicial killings and torture) rather than the economic and political rights that we are examining. In contrast, Abouharb and Cingranelli (2007, 2009) also examined physical integrity rights and found a negative association between IMF programs and these human rights. In addition, they examined economic and social rights and worker rights and found a negative relationship between IMF programs and government respect for these other categories of rights (Abouharb and Cingranelli 2007).

⁴ Of the 15 country programs studied in a 2003 IMF report, nine saw privatization reforms. An additional five saw related reforms like “restructuring public enterprises” and “encouraging private sector entry to areas dominated by the state” (IMF 2003).

⁵ This is particularly interesting in light of the original IMF Articles of Agreement, which set out the goals of the IMF. The second paragraph of Article 1 states that the IMF’s purpose is “to facilitate the expansion and balanced growth of international trade, and to contribute thereby to the promotion and maintenance of high levels of employment and real income, and to the development of the productive resources of all members as primary objectives of economic policy” (quoted in Donnelly 2013:244).

⁶ Like many other topics of research, there is disagreement about the nature of the connections between IMF involvement in a state and levels of violence or even conflict that follows (Hartzell et al. 2010; Midtgaard, Chaitanya, and De Soysa 2014). However, existing findings of some levels of violence coupled with case studies documenting violence support our claims that violence can undermine state capacity (Auvinen 1996; Mantanika and Kouki 2011; Sidell 1988; Walton and Ragin 1990).

⁷ Similar to Dreher and Gassebner (2012), we also ran separate models to examine whether IMF’s Stand-by-Arrangement (SBA) and Structural Adjustment Facility and Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (SAF/PRGF) have similar effects on women’s rights. We find that both variables are statistically significant in the models using the women’s economic rights variable as the outcome measure. See Table A1 in the appendix.

⁸ Our main results remain unaltered when we replaced the female population variable with a total population (men plus women) variable.

⁹ We ran additional models to explore whether our results are robust to the inclusion of the dominant religion and the extent of ethnic or religious fractionalization variables. There was no major change in the findings when we introduce the religion and fractionalization variables to the model (see the online appendix).

¹⁰ To run the test, we estimated two logit models that include the presence of IMF programs as the dependent variable and control for 1- and 2-year lagged values of the women’s economic and political rights variables separately. The models also include 1- and 2-year lagged values of the IMF variable. The p value for the equation including the women’s economic rights is .60, and for women’s political rights it is .12, indicating that women’s rights do not Granger-cause IMF lending decisions.