A Virus of Austerity?

Oxfam new analysis finds that a whopping 84 percent of the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) COVID-19 loans encourage, and in some cases require, countries to adopt more tough austerity measures in the aftermath of the health crisis. We found that 76 out of the 91 IMF loans negotiated with 81 countries since March 2020 push for belt-tightening that could result in cuts to public healthcare systems and pension schemes, wage freezes and cuts for public sector workers. 9 countries are likely to introduce or increase the collection of value-added taxes (VAT), which apply to everyday products like food, clothing and households supplies, and fall disproportionately on lowest income households, while 14 countries are likely to freeze or cut public sector wages and jobs. This work comes just days after 500+ organizations and academics called on the IMF to #EndAusterity (we’ll be using that hashtag to keep up the pressure all week and hope you do too!)

Read this blog with our analysis and other interesting trends we found and check out our new open-access dataset ‘Behind the Numbers’ on the spending, accountability, and recovery measures included in the IMF’s COVID-19 loans that we’ve been compiling since March.

World Bank not doing enough on health fees

On the World Bank, we analysed the full set of emergency health projects that are part of the World Bank’s COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Program (SPRP) as of June 30th, covering 71 countries. We found that only 8 out of 71 projects make any move to eliminate or suspend fees that exclude people from life-saving health care. This, despite fees being prohibitive in at least 80% of those countries. Out-of-pocket healthcare expenses hit the poor and women the hardest and, prior to the pandemic, pushed 100 million people into poverty every year.

Read the blog “People can’t afford to pay for healthcare in a pandemic, why won’t the World Bank do more to help?” with this analysis. This forms just one part of a larger piece of research assessing the Bank’s COVID-19 emergency health financing and which we’ll be publishing next month so do look out for that!

The Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index

Last week, Oxfam and Development Finance International (DFI) released our Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index 2020 which ranks 158 countries on their level of effort in tackling inequality through public services, taxation, and workers’ rights. The overwhelming finding is that no country was doing enough to tackle inequality going into this crisis which means countries were woefully unprepared for COVID-19 ―just one in six countries was spending enough on health when the virus struck, for example, while only one in three countries representing 22 percent of the global workforce, had safety nets for workers to fall back on if they lost their job or became sick. 

The Index contains a massive wealth of information collected from governments around the world and gives people a really strong sense on where any given government stands and where it can improve on reducing inequality. We hope this is a useful tool for CSOs and other stakeholders to do advocacy at the national level on their governments as well as on the IFIs influencing so many of these policies.

Read the report Fighting Inequality in the time of COVID-19 detailing the findings and check out inequalityindex.org  to explore the data further!

Your contact point for this report:

NADIA DAAR | Head of Washington DC Office | Oxfam International
1101 17th Street NW, 13th Floor, Washington, DC  20036  USA
tel. +1 202 496 1176 | cell +1 202 615 2390
twitter: @nadiadaar | skype: nadiadaar