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"CONDITIONALITY"
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IMF conditionality and development policy space, 1985-2014
In recent years, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has re-emerged as a central actor in global economic governance. Its rhetoric and policies suggest that the organization has radically changed the ways in which it offers financial assistance to countries in economic trouble. We revisit two long-standing controversies: Has the policy content of IMF programmes evolved to allow for more policy space? Do these programmes now allow for the protection of labour and social policies? We collected relevant archival material on the IMF's lending operations and identified all policy conditionality in IMF loan agreements between 1985 and 2014, extracting 55,465 individual conditions across 131 countries in total. We find little evidence of a fundamental transformation of IMF conditionality. The organization's post-2008 programmes reincorporated many of the mandated reforms that the organization claims to no longer advocate and the number of conditions has been increasing. We also find that policies introduced to ameliorate the social consequences of IMF macroeconomic advice have been inadequately incorporated into programme design. Drawing on this evidence, we argue that multiple layers of rhetoric and ceremonial reforms have been designed to obscure the actual practice of adjustment programmes, revealing an escalating commitment to hypocrisy.
Journal Article
The Mechanisms and Consequences of Interspecific Competition Among Plants
During the past 100 years, studies spanning thousands of taxa across almost all biomes have demonstrated that competition has powerful negative effects on the performance of individuals and can affect the composition of plant communities, the evolution of traits, and the functioning of whole ecosystems. In this review, we highlight new and important developments that have the potential to greatly improve our understanding of how plants compete and the consequences of competition from individuals to communities in the following major areas of research: (
a
) mechanisms of competition, (
b
) competitive effect and response, (
c
) direct and indirect effects of competition, (
d
) population-level effects of competition, (
e
) biogeographical differences in competition, and (
f
) conditionality of competition. Ecologists have discovered much about competition, but the mechanisms of competition and how competition affects the organization of communities in nature still require both theoretical and empirical exploration.
Journal Article
The effectiveness of the EU’s rule of law conditionality mechanism : Theoretical observations based on the case of Hungary
The effectiveness of post-accession conditionality within the EU has been of pivotal importance for the EU in past years. The European Union has plenty of tools for monitoring the compliance of EU Member States; however, when it comes to enforcement mechanisms, EU institutions perform poorly. Respect for the rule of law is especially crucial in this regard, as certain Member States (i.e. Poland and Hungary) have committed violations in this area. Hungary has been subject to several infringement procedures due to failure to comply with EU law, and the Article 7 procedure has even been activated against it. In 2020, the EU decided to connect rule-of-law violations to the EU budget disbursement by introducing the rule-of-law conditionality mechanism, which was launched against Hungary in 2022. This paper evaluates this conditionality mechanism through the example of Hungary and assesses whether it is more effective than the previous tools used to address rogue Member State behaviour and prevent continuous rule-of-law violations on a national level.
Journal Article
Metric correctness of pairwise comparisons in intelligent data analysis
In modern data analysis and machine learning, data are often represented in the form of pairwise comparisons of the elements of the data set. The pairwise comparisons immediately correspond to the similarity or dissimilarity of objects under investigation, and such a situation regularly arises in the domains of image and signal analysis, bioinformatics, expert evaluation, etc. The practical pairwise comparison functions may be incorrect in terms of potentially using them as scalar products or distances. In contrast to other approaches, we develop in this paper a technique based on the so-called metric approach, which proposes to modify the values of empirical functions so as to get scalar products or distances. The methods for obtaining the correct matrices of pairwise comparisons and for improving their conditionality are developed here.
Journal Article
Re-examining ‘personalised conditionality’: full-time obligations, partial adjustments and power asymmetries in the UK’s approach to work-related conditionality
Work-related conditionality policy in the UK is built around the problematic assumption that people should commit to ‘full-time’ work and job search efforts as a condition of receiving benefits. This is potentially in conflict with the idea that what is required of people should be tailored to their circumstances in some way – ‘personalised conditionality’ – and implies a failure to recognise that conditionality is being applied to a diverse group of people and in a context where the paid work that is available is often temporary and insecure. Drawing on thirty-three qualitative interviews with people subject to intensive work-related conditionality whilst receiving Universal Credit or Jobseeker’s Allowance in Manchester, the paper explores the work-related time demands that people were facing and argues that these provide a lens for examining the rigidities and contradictions of conditionality policy. The findings indicate that expectations are often set in relation to an ideal of full-time hours and in a highly asymmetric context that is far from conducive to being able to negotiate a reasonable set of work-related expectations. Work search requirements affect people differently depending on their personal circumstances and demand-side factors, and can act to weaken the position of people entering, or already in, work.
Journal Article
Activating the Welfare Subject: The Problem of Agency
While accepting Banton’s recently expressed view that sociology and social policy are distinct disciplines, this article argues that times of radical change can profitably bring the two into closer dialogue. Considering an argument from Emirbayer and Mische that agency becomes especially apparent in unsettled times, it focuses on conceptions of agency at play in the design and implementation of recent UK welfare reforms, and in subsequent legal challenges. Identifying a series of key measures in the Welfare Reform Act of 2012 and the Welfare and Work Act of 2016, this article examines the challenges that have ensued, and the way that agency is revealed as both a site of disciplinary control and as a focus for contestation, pitting the purposive rationality of welfare reform against the practical reason that emerges from claimant experience.
Journal Article
How the Green Architecture of the 2023–2027 Common Agricultural Policy could have been greener
A new 5-year Common Agricultural Policy has been in place since January 2023. Like its predecessors, this new policy will fail to deliver significant climatic and environmental benefits. We show how the Green Architecture of the policy relying on the three instruments of conditionality, eco-schemes, and agri-environment and climate measures could have been used more consistently and effectively. Our proposals are based on core principles of public economics and fiscal federalism as well as on research results in agronomy and ecology. Conditionality criteria are the minimal requirements that every agricultural producer must meet. Farmers should be rewarded for efforts that go beyond these basic requirements through eco-schemes for global public goods complemented by agri-environment and climate measures centred on local public goods. Eco-schemes should cover the whole agricultural area by targeting permanent grasslands, crop diversification, and green cover and non-productive agro-ecological infrastructures. We discuss trade-offs that our proposals could generate.
Journal Article
Linking Money to Values: The New Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation and Its Constitutional Challenges
In December 2020, the EU institutions finally approved the new Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation after a controversial legislative process. The new Regulation allows the Commission and the Council to suspend EU funds in case of breaches to the rule of law that have negative effects on the EU budget and financial interests. This article analyses the new Regulation against the background of the rise of conditionality as a tool of EU governance. It argues, in contrast to some of the first analyses of the new Regulation, that the amendments adopted during the legislative process cannot simply be seen as a watered-down compromise, but were crucial to ensure the legality of the new instrument. At the same time, the EU’s growing reliance on conditionality continues to raise profound constitutional questions that still needs to be adequately addressed in the institutional and academic debate.
Journal Article
IMF conditionality and government education spending: The case of 10 MENA countries
This study explores the impact of International Monetary Fund (IMF)-linked conditionality on government education expenditures in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Understanding the impact of conditional lending by international financial institutions on education spending is important due to the pivotal role education plays in fostering social and economic development. We use country-level panel data encompassing a representative set of 10 MENA countries from 1990 to 2020 and employ a cross-national fixed effects regression model. Our findings suggest that IMF conditionality demonstrates a positive relationship with government education expenditures in the MENA region. The proposed explanation is that the application of IMF policy advice can have a catalytic effect on donor financing, including for education. This indicates that the Fund's financing arrangements in the region can free up fiscal space for social spending, which, in turn, signals a sort of departure of the IMF from the reputation that typically precedes it-its traditional bias for macroeconomic stability irrespective of social costs. We argue that our findings are instructive for policy, especially if one shares the idea that education is a necessary prerequisite for achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4: guaranteeing inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting enduring learning opportunities for all.
Journal Article