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The G8 Summit 2006 and global economic justice
The richest countries set the economic policies that govern the world. Can women look to this year's pledges by the Group of Eight to facilitate economic justice?
The Worldwide Resistance of Women to Neoliberalism
Neoliberal globalization is based on patriarchy and therefore on the widespread oppression of women. Confronted by accelerating impoverishment and by more and more sophisticated forms of exclusion, numbers of women are aware that the diversity of their demands and their experience of economic pluralism form a counter-current to the dominant economic theory - neoliberal and patricidal - and represent serious forms of resistance.
World Bank and Women’s Rights in Development
In recent years, factors that are considered “social issues” (e.g. gender, the environment) have become part of the dialogue around macroeconomics, aid and debt. A tendency remains, however, for the World Bank to focus first on market-based criteria and then to add on social policies. This “add on” approach can produce policies that impose additional burdens on women while failing to address their needs. For the World Bank to be truly accountable to women, it needs to open the dominant macroeconomic model up to debate and seriously consider reforming it or replacing it with alternative visions. Growth may be a necessary component in the elimination of poverty, but it is not sufficient on its own and may be accompanied by rising inequalities.
Ten Principles for Challenging Neoliberal Globalisation
Neoliberal globalization is one of the primary threats to women’s human rights and equitable, sustainable development that we face today. Every day and in almost every aspect of life, gender equality and women’s rights are affected by economic policy. Choices and opportunities regarding education, health care, employment, and childcare, for example, are all directly impacted by national economic agendas and international financial forces. Women therefore have a lot to lose when economic policies do not take gender discrimination and gender roles into account. At the same time, women’s rights can be advanced through economic policies that put their concerns, needs, and livelihoods at the centre of the analysis.
Shape up or ship out: Why Millennium Goal No. 3 can not be achieved until the multilateral institutions stop imposing neo-liberal policy on the
Whilst undertaking research on macro-economic policy and the feminisation of poverty, I was struck by how many miles have already been walked, how many articles and books have already been written, how many task-forces have already been deployed, and how the policies of the multilateral institutions remain unashamedly as opaque and undemocratic as ever. The evidence and the research are astounding and date back to decades before now. Countless reports and articles have succinctly and systematically recorded and analysed the forces of neo-liberal globalisation and how they are destroying the livelihoods of people all over the world.
Economic Globalisation and Paradoxes
Technological development, market integration, and free movement of goods, capital, and labour have resulted in enormous opportunities for human development and the uprooting of many maladies of humankind such as poverty and hunger. Current trends in the world, however, indicate that the benefits of economic globalisation are unevenly distributed and that they stimulate discrimination and inequality. Thanks to neoliberal politics based on gathering profit at any cost, paradoxes in the form of bigger gaps between the rich and the poor are intensified.
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