Social protection systems in Arab countries have declined after the implementation of programs and agreements with the International Monetary Fund, which led to the replacement of comprehensive social protection programs in these countries with cash transfers, targeting in the most impoverished countries in the region.
In this context, the regional project “Economic Policies for Social Justice in the MENA Region” in the Friedrich Ebert Foundation launched in October 2022 a report labelled “Uncovered: The role of the IMF in shrinking social protection, Case Studies from Tunisia, Jordan and Morocco”.
This report aims to assess a number of the most important schemes pushed by the International Monetary Fund in the countries of the Arab region under the name of social protection with an international comparison by peer review and experts.
Thus, the report assesses targeted monetary support programs in terms of their impact on poverty and social justice.
Also, public spending on health and education in these three countries was also analyzed as a percentage of gross domestic product and as an indicator of the IMF’s focus on social protection and the Sustainable Development Goals SDG3 and SDG4.
The case studies conclude that all three countries, in one way or another, and despite all the new monetary support programs that the World Bank has also helped implement, have experienced a decade of deterioration of social protection.
To read the full book: click here
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.