THE IMF AND THE POLITICS OF AUSTERITY IN THE WAKE OF THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS – BEN CLIFT

This book explores the IMF’s role within the politics of austerity by providing a path‑breaking, comprehensive analysis of how the IMF’s approach to fiscal policy has evolved since 2008, and how the Fund worked to alter advanced‑economy policy responses to the global financial crisis (GFC) and the Eurozone crisis. 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 to fix meanings attached to economic policies within the social process of constructing economic orthodoxy.

The book is interested in the politics of economic ideas, focusing on the assumptive foundations of different approaches to economic policy and on how the interpretive framework through which authoritative voices evaluate 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 to account for the scope and limits of Fund influence. The Fund’s reputation as a technocratic, scientific source of economic‑policy wisdom is important for its intellectual authority, yet, as this book demonstrates, the Fund makes normatively driven interventions in ideologically charged economic‑policy debates. The analysis reveals the malleability of conventional wisdom about economic policy and the processes of its social construction.

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