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Social policy and macroeconomic performance
Elson, Diane
Elson, Diane
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elsolong.pdf
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Abstract
"The quotation marks are placed around the economic and the social alert us to the fact that this is an abstract duality. People do not live their lives in two separate domains. The aspects of life that we label economic and social are intertwined. The policies we label economic and social each have ramifications for both the dimensions we label economic and those we label social . As Barbara Harriss-White points out in her contribution, social policy is economic policy . But at the same time, as pointed out in Elson and Cagatay (2000), economic policy is social policy. Nevertheless, the distinctions do relate to some real divisions and are grounded in the different rhythms and modalities of market-based capital accumulation (the commodity economy) on the one hand, and non-market-based social reproduction (the unpaid care economy), on the other. There are different institutional responsibilities for economic policy and social policy; different policy analysis communities; different interest groups lobbying. The standard neo-liberal approach overemphasized these differences, and assumed that each strand of policy could be pursued independently of the other. Moreover, social policy was seen as a residual, only required to deal with the widows and orphans, the lame and the sick. The movement away from the standard neo-liberal approach, to incorporate more discussion of institutions, has been characterised by a rediscovery of the interactions between the economic and the social and a revalidation of the social as having more than residual status. But this is mainly at the micro level, and only on terms that are compatible with microeconomic thinking, whether of the old-style or new improved varieties. As Ben Fine argues in his contribution, concepts social capital are part of the problem rather than part of the solution. They blur and obscure the tensions between capital accumulation and social reproduction, tensions in which the distinction between the economic and the social need to be grounded. At the macro-level, however, the social is still very much seen as an afterthought. Although there is now widespread recognition of the need to integrate macroeconomic management and social policy there is still a strong tendency to think this means continuing to design what are termed sound macroeconomic policies with a focus on market-based criteria, an overriding emphasis on stabilizing the price level and reducing the role of the state, and then adding-on social policies in order to achieve socially desirable outcomes such as poverty reduction. This is how the World Bank s Comprehensive Development Framework operates. As shown in Elson and Cagatay (2000), the CDF does not explicitly consider macroeconomic policy at all. Prudent fiscal and monetary polices are described as the essential backdrop to the CDF and the specification of exactly what these are is treated as beyond discussion; similarly with the new IMF concern with social policy in the context of debt-relief initiatives. The emphasis is on adding on new sectoral policies to help those adversely affected, not to reconsider the design of macroeconomic policies and the organisation of the policy process. The new focus of the Bank and the Fund on participation in policy dialogue only extends to micro and sectoral policies."(pg 1)
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2002-07
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With permission of the license/copyright holder