IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde and Klaus Regling, Managing Director of the European Stability Mechanism meet to evaluate Greece's request for a new bailout package,July 2015. Wiktor Dabkowski DPA/Press Association. All rights reserved. Recent commentary on research I conducted with Paul White, has caused a stir. Our paper in the Journal of Australian Political Economy was the subject of a review in The Conversation and the Huffington Post. The review, by the eminent academics political economist Frank Stilwell and historian Christopher Sheil, suggested that the IMF ‘was showing some hypocrisy on inequality’ and summarised our findings and critique, as well as some wider debates on inequality.
The IMF responded strongly to this, arguing that they ‘are walking-the-talk’ on inequality and, further, that a series of operational programmes with member states are ‘bridging research and reality’. The IMF response drew attention to the high-level policy commitments and research that we draw on in our paper and a number of initially ‘pilot’ programmes which focus on different aspects of inequality with specific countries.
Their response suggests that there are now 15 more of these on inequality, 9 on gender and 15 on climate change. The Fund also kindly invited me in to speak to them this week about our paper and their new operational work.
