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The IMF and the Politics of Austerity in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis

Online ISBN:
9780191851070
Print ISBN:
9780198813088
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The IMF and the Politics of Austerity in the Wake of the Global Financial Crisis

Ben Clift
Ben Clift

Professor of Political Economy

Professor of Political Economy, University of Warwick
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Published online:
19 April 2018
Published in print:
22 February 2018
Online ISBN:
9780191851070
Print ISBN:
9780198813088
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The book provides a path-breaking comprehensive analysis of how the IMF approach to fiscal policy has evolved since 2008, the Fund’s role within the politics of austerity, and how it worked to shape advanced economy policy responses to the global financial crisis (GFC) and the Eurozone crisis. The book aligns with and advances cutting-edge ideational scholarship in international political economy (IPE) and comparative political economy (CPE) to build an innovative theorizing of how ideational change operates in international organizations (IOs). The construction of economic policy knowledge is understood here as a social process, wherein the IMF works to impress its interpretation of sound policy upon member countries through surveillance and other interactions. It updates and refines our understanding of how the IMF seeks to wield ideational power by analysing the Fund’s post-crash ability to influence what constitutes legitimate knowledge, and their ability to fix meanings attached to economic policies. This book is interested in the politics of economic ideas, focused on the assumptive foundations of different approaches to economic policy, and how the interpretive framework through which authoritative voices evaluate economic policy is an important site of power in world politics. After establishing the internal conditions of possibility for new fiscal policy thinking to emerge and prevail, detailed case studies of IMF interactions with the UK and French governments during the Great Recession drill down into how the Fund seeks to shape the policy possibilities of advanced economy policymakers and account for the scope and limits of Fund influence.

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