Omar Samir Khalaf
Egypt ,Morocco ,Tunisia
Omar Samir
This paper analyzes the roles of the international financial institutions, which are contradictory to the Arab Spring countries, between the mistakes of the past, the call for more just policies, and the actual policies to support a more severe austerity and structural adjustment programs, Economic and social rights and whether there were experiences outside the box of such institutions?
The paper tackled the impact of regional and international financial institutions on the economic policies of the Arab Spring countries. The policies of these institutions in the Arab region and the associated conditionalities through analyzing the Arab regional roles and conditionalities associated with institutions such as the Arab Monetary Fund, the African Development Bank. Because of their economic weight for the Arab Spring countries, especially in Egypt, and the solution of the conditionalities of the Gulf international institutions, and the increasing lending activity coming from the Gulf countries and these institutions towards the Arab Spring countries combined Attempts to impose the stability of regimes hostile to the idea of social justice.
The EU’s priorities were to respond to the demands of political and civil rights in terms of emphasizing the importance of democracy and human rights without giving sufficient weight to the economic and social factors of the revolutions and the resulting demands and slogans. The financial response was through Deauville’s partnership, which describes economic packages that follow free market policies, opening up markets and liberalizing trade, attracting foreign direct investment, privatization and austerity in public spending targets that must be achieved for economic reform, namely With the policies and revolutions of the revolutions.
These structural reforms based on the assumption that the liberalization and privatization of the economy in these countries would lead to growth and development. Each of these items was justified in the light of traditional economies that developed as a technical solution to reduce inflation, eliminate the budget deficit and the elimination of price distortions, and raise the level of efficiency. In fact, what these policies have done is to reduce the powers of the States concerned with regard to the management and protection of its economy and open the market for external interventions, which affected the domestic markets of these countries. through this the World Bank with support from the International Monetary Fund that could be international and local actors, the dominant control in the economy of these countries at the expense of the poor, which led to the widening of the gap between the classes and the absence of justice in the distribution of wealth.
In addition, the paper presented a review of the experiences of the opposite of the policies imposed by the international financial institutions. The experiences of Uruguay, Ecuador, Argentina, Bolivia and Brazil are inspiring in reducing poverty and unemployment and improving the economic and social rights of millions of citizens. These experiences dealt with government bankruptcy crises and the accumulation of external and internal indebtedness, Trade and balance of payments levels that their economies could not afford, but managed an ambitious plan to negotiate and schedule debt and encourage self-management of factories to go beyond this crushing crisis.
the most important conclusion of the paper was that the international financial institutions, which tried to change their rhetoric towards increasing the scope of wordings bout economic and social rights, had actually promoted policies that limited social justice or, at the very least, indebtedness programs with minimal conditions for any attempt to reduce poverty and promote social agendas. While the conditionalities of regional financial institutions and sometimes the individual influences of the Gulf States have been strengthened, with the ability to impose conditionalities that promote instability and undermine efforts to establish social justice.
Full version of the paper is available in Arabic on the following link:
https://bit.ly/2IBJo0c