The impact of International Monetary Fund programmes on the socio-economic status of women

Through its mechanism of conditionality, the IMF can tie funding to economic policy changes, encouraging states to implement different economic models. While several papers find that IMF programmes negatively impact the health or education of women, little is known about the impact of IMF programmes upon the SES (socio-economic status) of women. The SES of women considers maternal health care, female education and female labour force participation. In this thesis, I argue that while participation in an IMF programme has the potential to impact the SES of women, it is the factors of programme design and programme implementation levels that are crucial. I argue that programme design is critical, as spending reforms which focus upon budgetary contraction and increasing the tax base have the capacity to negatively and disproportionately impact the SES of women, while certain structural reforms for economic growth have the capacity to positively impact the SES of women. I argue additionally that the programme implementation levels are critical to the impact the IMF can have on the SES of women. While a state may sign an IMF agreement with varying conditions, it is the level of implementation which will determine whether changes in the SES of women can be attributed to the IMF programme. To substantiate these theoretical arguments, I combine data on IMF programmes with data on the SES of women for 173 countries between 1990 and 2011 and use a treatment effects model with a Markov transition in the treatment equation to interrogate the data. This thesis finds evidence that participation in an IMF programme has a mixed impact upon the SES of women. There is evidence of some positive and statistically significant impact on the maternal health of women, female primary enrollment and completion levels, and a negative and statistically significant impact on female labour force participation. However, importantly this impact is eroded when the model controls for implementation levels or programme design, implying that the programme design or programme implementation fails to capitalise on potential gains from participation in an IMF agreement.