Soluciones tecnológicas

I argue that this study has made a number of contributions to the existing body of research in the area of IMF and gender. There is also room for continued work in this area. This study has brought new insight on what impact IMF programmes have on the SES of women, specifically, maternal health, female education and female labour force participation. This study also explored male education and male labour force participation enabling a level of comparative analysis. This is also a new contribution to the existing body of research and is an important contribution to the current body of research.

Current research is heavily qualitative in approach and most often uses case studies to explore detail. This study focused on developing a cross-country macro understanding of the impact

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of IMF programmes upon the SES of women, primarily utilising quantitative methods. This answers a call from Stotsky (2006a) for a systematic cross-country study supported by statistical evidence investigating whether IMF programmes damage or enhance the lives of women. As such, this study adds to the body of literature and will help to bridge our knowledge of what impact IMF programmes have upon women (and men).

Future research should continue to observe the impact that IMF programmes have upon the SES of women. This study focused upon the time period of 1990 – 2011. It would be valuable to extend this period of investigation and to expand research to include current data as far as possible. This new time period also holds the potential to explore the impact of the recent IMF policy pivot on gender and whether and how current IMF interest in gender is being deployed into IMF agreements. Future research should also extend the study through the use of case study. It would be valuable to select a smaller subgroup data and conduct a deeper analysis through case studies. This smaller subset could include countries where the impact IMF programmes varied from positive to negative. This would provide an opportunity for exploring the very specific nature of the programme design and programme implementation in the context of gender.

This study importantly presents two new datasets. The first new dataset attempts to measure IMF programme design and roughly captures the extent to which an IMF programme is focused upon macroeconomic or structural adjustment. This dataset has the potential to be valuable past this study and become a resource to the wider community exploring the impact of IMF programmes. Secondly, this study also presents a new dataset measuring IMF programme implementation which captures the level to which states complete or implement their IMF programmes. There is also nuance to this dataset as it facilitates not only an overall completion rate but also completion rates of macroeconomic or structural conditions. Again, this dataset has the potential to be valuable past this study and become a resource to the wider community exploring the impact of IMF programmes.

It is important to ensure that future research includes a focus to ensure that these new datasets constructed for this study are suitable and available for use within the wider research community. The IMF has enormous power and influence. It is imperative that researchers explore the impact of IMF programmes, have available to them, datasets which can help facilitate greater analytical nuance.

Finally, this study contributes a review of the current “state of play” of gender within the IMF, highlighting the potential ‘policy pivot’ around gender. It is clear from the level of research coming from the IMF, along with the discourse from its leader, that gender is now a key topic of interest within the IMF. Leaders within the IMF are interested in employing a gender mainstreaming strategy. However, there are limitations to this policy pivot which should be noted. The remit of the IMF is economic, and the focus of the IMF’s own research in regard to gender is centred around female labour force participation. There is not only room for, but

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also a necessity to, keep the IMF ‘in check’ with regards to this approach. As with men, there are multiple socio-economic concerns with regard to women.

Future research should continue to hold a broader contextualization of women and their relationships with IMF programmes. This is not to say each individual research project should always consider the SES of women, multiple indicators or a variety of measures relating to women. Future research should not be limited to economically focused measures of women. The results of this study highlight the irony of such a situation, illustrating no material impact of IMF programmes on women’s labour force participation, yet also finding a statistically significant of IMF programmes on maternal health and female and male education. I echo Zuckerman’s (2014) calls for an approach that would also consider women’s rights, arguing that ‘women’s rights are drowned out by its smart economics framework’. The reality is, the IMF may have at its core, a remit which is fiscal and economic, IMF programmes may be fiscally and economically orientated, but the impact of IMF programmes goes far beyond the economic and the fiscal.

This reality demands responsibility from the IMF to recognise that its programmes can improve their potential for economic growth by incorporating measures to tackle gender inequality.

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