Is Austerity Gendered? E-Book

Diane Perrons

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to History
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 139

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Austerity has dominated the policy agenda in the past decade. Although it appeared to end with the COVID-19 pandemic, a return to harsh cutbacks in the future cannot be ruled out. In this incisive analysis, Diane Perrons shows that while austerity policies have devastating effects on people's lives, their gendered dynamics are particularly conspicuous: budget cuts have been overwhelmingly aimed at services used by women. She shows how the gender aspects of this economic and social catastrophe intersected with a range of other factors, making the experience of austerity very different for different groups - and highly unjust. Not only that, it undermined responses to COVID-19. She finishes by critiquing the justifications for austerity policies and asks whether there are compelling alternatives that can re-invigorate economies and societies after the pandemic, and avoid a return to austerity. This compelling book will be essential reading for activists, policymakers and students of feminist political economy everywhere.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: Austerity, Gender and COVID-19

Notes

2 The Gendered Impact of Austerity

The uneven gender division of labour between work and care

First jeopardy: Cuts in public sector jobs, pay and conditions

Second jeopardy: Cuts in public services

Third jeopardy: Loss of social protection

Austerity and human rights

Coronavirus crisis and the end of austerity?

Notes

3 The Austerity Deception: Gendering Economics

Neoliberal and feminist understandings of the economy

The neoliberal case for austerity: Fiscal space, public debt and gender biases

Feminist economists’ understanding of fiscal space and alternatives to austerity

Notes

4 Alternative Futures

Austerity, resistance and demand for change

Towards alternatives to austerity and alternative futures

Towards more transformative change

Feminist Plan F

The purple economy

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Begin Reading

Bibliography

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 2

Figure 2.1.

Impact of changes in taxes and benefits, 2010–20, United Kingdom

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1.

Gendering fiscal space

Chapter 4

Figure 4.1.

Comparative employment effects of investing in social and physical…

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Diane Perrons, Is Austerity Gendered?

Is Austerity Gendered?

Diane Perrons

polity

Copyright © Diane Perrons 2021

The right of Diane Perrons to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2021 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2699-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Perrons, Diane, author.Title: Is austerity gendered? / Diane Perrons.Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2021. | Series: The future of capitalism | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “A devastating account of how women bear the brunt of crisis and austerity”-- Provided by publisher.Identifiers: LCCN 2020032877 (print) | LCCN 2020032878 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509526956 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509526963 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509526994 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Recessions--Social aspects. | Financial crises--Social aspects. | Women--Economic conditions. | Sexual division of labor.Classification: LCC HB3718 .P47 2021 (print) | LCC HB3718 (ebook) | DDC 306.3/6082--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032877LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032878

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Dedication

To my children and grandchildren, and in the hope of a more equitable and sustainable world.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the three anonymous referees for their very helpful comments; to George Owers and Julia Davies for their editorial work and patience; and to the production team at Polity, especially Manuela Tecusan for her extremely diligent and timely copyediting. I would also like to thank the UK Women’s Budget Group for their permission to reproduce Figures 2.1 and 4.1, as well as for their work on austerity and the COVID-19 crisis; to the many people participating in the various webinars that took place during the lockdown, in particular those organised by IAFFE and UN Women, from which I have learned a great deal; to students on the Feminist Economics course at LSE, where many of these ideas were first presented; to my colleague Ania Plomien, with whom I have collaborated over the years; to Diane Elson, for many informative walking talks; to Amanda Shaw for research assistance; and to Robin Dunford, for his very valuable comments on an earlier draft. All errors and misunderstandings are mine.

1Introduction: Austerity, Gender and COVID-19

At the time of writing the world is in the midst of a global pandemic caused by a highly contagious coronavirus: corona, or COVID-19.1 This disease has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide, a dramatic decline in economic activity and unprecedented increases in public deficits and debt as countries respond to the immediate health crisis and associated economic collapse.

So why ask now whether austerity is gendered? There are two key reasons. First, the cuts in health and social services during the preceding era of austerity meant that societies were ill prepared for the pandemic; and, second, when the immediate health crisis passes, there are likely to be new rounds of austerity to pay back the public debt, and they will have all the gendered and discriminatory impacts outlined in this book, unless there is a profound change in economic thinking and policy. So it is critical to show how unjust and gendered austerity is and why policymakers fail to notice or take account of these injustices. Even more importantly, as societies attempt to rebuild after this crisis, it is crucial to recognise that there are alternatives to austerity that are much more likely to resolve the problems austerity is designed to address and more likely to lead to equitable and sustainable outcomes. As Arundhati Roy has argued, the world is facing a rupture and

a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.2

In this book I consider the rationale for choosing a different world by demonstrating, in chapter 2, the gendered and unjust impact of austerity; by explaining, in chapter 3, how the economic thinking that justifies austerity is gendered; and by discussing, in chapter 4, some of the alternatives to austerity. My focus and perspective come from the global North, and especially from the United Kingdom, my own location; but austerity is a worldwide policy, often enforced by international financial institutions (IFIs) with parallel gender impacts, so I try to engage with the issue at a more global level by drawing on illustrations from elsewhere. In this introduction I outline what austerity is, the context in which it was introduced in the early twenty-first century and how the coronavirus crisis brought it to an abrupt end in 2020, but simultaneously created circumstances in which it is likely to be reintroduced.

Austerity can be defined as a conscious policy designed to reduce public deficits and debt by cutting public expenditure or raising revenue or both. ‘Public deficit’ refers to the annual shortfall between government expenditure and government revenue, while ‘public debt’ refers to the accumulation of deficits over time, or the long-term government debt. It is thought that reducing public deficits and debt through austerity programmes will secure economic stability, so that economic growth will resume. Almost always austerity is practised in ways that lead to cuts in public sector services, in public sector employment and in social protection – that is, in policies designed to reduce poverty throughout the life cycle; and all these cuts disproportionately disadvantage women, low-income people and BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) groups, all of whom are more likely to be reliant on the public sector for employment, services and supplements to low or no incomes.

The contemporary era of austerity began in 2010, when public deficits and debt had reached what was considered to be unsustainable levels. This happened after governments attempted to stimulate economies in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which originated in the United States and United Kingdom and left many banks and financial institutions with vast amounts of debt and unable to pay their creditors. Potential investors were unable to borrow; ‘ordinary people’ could not withdraw their savings and were said to be only two hours away from being unable to get cash from ATMs.3 As these economies ground to a halt, there were fears of a total economic breakdown not only in Europe and the United States but in many other countries, as the impact of the crisis was transmitted via international financial markets and trade.

In response, the major economies around the world – the G204 – coordinated their activities, bailed out the banks and introduced stimulus packages to prevent economic collapse. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) supported these measures and urged governments to ‘follow whatever policies it takes to avoid a repeat of a Great Depression scenario’,5 a comment almost identical to the pledge made by leaders of the G20 in 2020 ‘to do what it takes’ to address the health crisis and economic collapse caused by COVID-19.6

So in 2008 the G20 agreed to spend vast sums of public money to bail out the banks and much smaller sums to restimulate their economies. Overall, 137 countries increased their public expenditure between 2008 and 2009 in order to fund the stimulus and to bail out the banks.7 The stimulus packages varied across countries, but generally included investment in physical infrastructure and support for manufacturing to increase male employment, which had been hit first by the crisis. Social expenditure designed to protect the most vulnerable was also increased, though to a lesser extent. South Africa, Finland and the United States increased their social spending by more than 40 per cent, the average being 24 per cent for mediumand low-income countries and 27 per cent for high-income countries, between 2008 and 2009.8 However, the size of the stimulus packages was completely overshadowed by the amount of public money lent to the banks. In the United States, the financial sector was given more than $5,000 billion, by comparison to just $829 billion received by the stimulus package – a sum equivalent to only 15 per cent of the bank’s handout. In Japan, the Republic of Korea and Australia, the stimulus programme was given 25 per cent of what the banks were given,9 while in Europe the banks received the equivalent of 36.7 per cent of European Union GDP, the stimulus programme only 1.5 per cent GDP.10

Bailing out the banks meant that there was a massive transfer of public funds to the private sector, that is, funds went from the public as a whole to banks, bankers and financiers, who were primarily responsible for the crisis. Ten years later this debt has been repaid fully only in the United States. Elsewhere the bailout is expected to remain a burden on the public for many years to come.11 As Christine Lagarde, then CEO of the IMF, recognised, the bankers have enjoyed ‘impunity, at a time when real wages continued to stagnate’.12 But, while the inequality was noted by the IMF, it has not been acted on in any significant way. For low-income countries states are asked to provide a social floor to protect women and the poorest people in society; but these requests, in contrast to economic measures, are not enforced.

Then as now, in the case of the response to COVID-19, the stimulus programmes (and bailout) increased public expenditure just at the moment when state revenues were going down as a result of declining economic growth and falling tax revenues, thereby leaving governments with rising public sector deficits and escalating public debt. In 2010, the IMF pointed to the ‘largest worsening of the fiscal accounts since the Second World War’ and observed that austerity – or, in its more euphemistic formulation, ‘fiscal consolidation’ – was vital to saving economies from total collapse. As a consequence, 115 countries around the world (76 developing countries and 39 high-income ones) embarked on austerity.13

This rapid turnabout from stimulus to austerity, from Keynesianism to neoliberalism, led to ‘austerity fever, a strange malady that combined extravagant fear with blithe optimism’.14 The fear was that economies would fall off a cliff if public debt exceeded 90 per cent of GDP,15 and the optimism was based on the idea that reducing government spending would generate economic growth.16 The resulting policy has been termed ‘austerity for prosperity’ or ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’ and was based on the belief that, through a contraction of the ‘fiscal space’ – that is, of the amount of money the government can spend – public sector deficits and debt will fall, the confidence of creditors will increase, interest rates will fall, and the public sector will stop crowding out the private sector, which will resume investing, thereby regenerating economic growth. This belief – that contraction would lead to expansion – is clearly oxymoronic in a literal sense, and did not work in practice. Evidence shows that countries practising austerity barely grew, and in some contraction led to an overall decline. Greece, for instance, recorded a decline of 25 per cent in GDP per capita between 2007 and 2013. Even in 2017, GDP remained 23 per cent lower than its pre-crisis level.

Nonetheless, governments around the world were fairly successful in persuading people that austerity was essential and that it would be in everyone’s long-term interest. One tactic was to pursue an analogy with household budgets. For example, the UK government argued that the country had ‘maxed out its credit card’ and that we (the country) would now have to ‘tighten our belts’.17 By so doing, it diverted attention from the mismanagement of bankers and financiers insofar as it implied that the debt was due to the profligacy of the state. This strategy made public spending and the corresponding debt appear to be the cause rather than the consequence of the crisis and provided a rationale for cuts in public spending – and thus for austerity.18