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Comité pour l'abolition des dettes illégitimes

Austerity/Structural Adjustment

Economic policies imposed by the IMF in exchange of new loans or the rescheduling of old loans.

Structural Adjustments policies were enforced in the early 1980 to qualify countries for new loans or for debt rescheduling by the IMF and the World Bank. The requested kind of adjustment aims at ensuring that the country can again service its external debt. Structural adjustment usually combines the following elements : devaluation of the national currency (in order to bring down the prices of exported goods and attract strong currencies), rise in interest rates (in order to attract international capital), reduction of public expenditure (’streamlining’ of public services staff, reduction of budgets devoted to education and the health sector, etc.), massive privatisations, reduction of public subsidies to some companies or products, freezing of salaries (to avoid inflation as a consequence of deflation). These SAPs have not only substantially contributed to higher and higher levels of indebtedness in the affected countries ; they have simultaneously led to higher prices (because of a high VAT rate and of the free market prices) and to a dramatic fall in the income of local populations (as a consequence of rising unemployment and of the dismantling of public services, among other factors).

Sri Lanka’s People Have Kicked Out the Old Political Class

25 November 2024 - by Balasingham Skanthakumar

The progressive alliance that backs Sri Lanka’s new president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, won a landslide victory in last week’s parliamentary election. The government has a clear mandate for change but now faces many obstacles to its reform (...)
Comrade President? Change and Continuity in Sri Lanka

29 September 2024 - by Balasingham Skanthakumar

Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s (AKD) victory on 21 September as the candidate of the centre-left National People’s Power (NPP) coalition is highly significant for symbolic and substantive reasons. His predecessors have been from the social and (...)
Is There A Life Without IMF: Debunking The Myth

22 September 2024 - by Eric Toussaint

Given that Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the progressive presidential candidate from National People’s Power, is leading in the election on September 21, 2024, it is crucial to consider the question: Could life exist without the IMF? According to (...)
1944-2024, 80 years of interference from the World Bank and the IMF, that’s enough !

The IMF and the World Bank in the time of Coronavirus: the failed campaign for a new image

18 September 2024 - by Eric Toussaint, Emilie Paumard, Milan Rivié

The World Bank and the IMF are 80 years old. 80 years of financial neo-colonialism and the imposition of austerity policies in the name of debt repayment. 80 years is enough! The Bretton Woods institutions must be abolished and replaced by (...)
The worst ever global debt crisis

17 August 2024 - by Collective, Development finance international

This policy briefing, based on the new Debt Service Watch database, shows that the citizens of the Global South now face the worst debt crisis since global records began. Debt service is absorbing an average 38% of budget revenue and 30% of (...)
End Austerity: A Global Report on Budget Cuts and Harmful Social Reforms in 2022-25

8 July 2024 - by Isabel Ortiz, Matthew Cummins

This report exposes the dangers of a post-pandemic austerity shock, far more premature and severe than the one that followed the global financial crisis. It finds that 85 percent of the world’s population is living in the grip of austerity, more (...)
1944-2024, 80 years of interference from the World Bank and the IMF, that’s enough !

Structural Adjustment and the Washington Consensus Are Not Abandoned in 2000

3 July 2024 - by Eric Toussaint

In July 2024, the World Bank and the IMF will be 80 years old. 80 years of financial neo-colonialism and the imposition of austerity policies in the name of debt repayment. 80 years is enough! The Bretton Woods institutions must be abolished and (...)
India : Analysis of Budget 2024–25, Part 1: Declining Budget Outlay

19 June 2024 - by Neeraj Jain

We have shown in considerable detail in previous articles published in the Janata Weekly on the economic situation in the country in early 2024 that the Indian economy is in deep crisis. The actual growth rate of the economy is much less than is (...)
The Drums of War are Banging in Europe

6 June 2024 - by Eric Toussaint, Paul Murphy, Miguel Urbán Crespo

These weeks see the end of the term for an ineffectual European legislature which served during the worst pandemic of this century, during Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and with it, the outbreak of a war on European soil that evokes the (...)
A World of Inequality

15 May 2024 - by Maxime Perriot

A central feature of neo-liberal capitalism, which has ruled the global economy since the 1990s, is to deepen and widen inequalities. It makes a tiny minority indecently richer while leaving the majority in the lurch. Women and minorities such (...)
Spring Meetings of the IMF and World Bank

The CADTM Denounces the Lack of Action on Climate Change and the Neoliberal Approach of the Bretton Woods Institutions

24 April 2024 - by CADTM International

The Spring Meetings of the IMF and World Bank ended on Saturday 20 April 2024. As expected, there were no changes to the neoliberal policies promoted and imposed by the Bretton Woods institutions. A demonstration was held in front of the (...)
Kathmandu Statement to End Austerity

20 April 2024 - by Collective

The World Social Forum in Nepal is an Open Space of social movements, NGOs, civil society organisations, trade unions, citizens who demand that “Another World is Possible”. We believe that ending austerity is central to the aims of this assembly (...)
New International Debt Crisis

2 April 2024 - by Eric Toussaint, Abdul Khaliq, Solange Koné, David Calleb Otieno, Amali Wedagedara, Aamanur Rahman

On February 16, 2024, at the World Social Forum in Kathmandu, Nepal, CADTM organised a discussion on the New International Debt Crisis, which discussed the new debt crisis engulfing a series of countries in the South. A number of speakers drew (...)
For a Europe of the peoples against the EU fortress of capitalism

26 March 2024 - by Eric Toussaint

The origin of the European Union is the ECSC – the European Coal and Steel Community or “Common Market.” The European Union was built on the idea of the primacy of the capitalist market and industrial production in the interest of big capital, and (...)
CSOs and TUs reject cosmetic consultations of IMF

21 March 2024 - by Collective

The IMF team is in Colombo for the Second Review of the ongoing Extended Fund Facility (EFF) loan agreement with Sri Lanka and will meet with some civil society organisations and think tanks in Colombo on 19 March 2024, to receive their views on (...)
Is there a debt crisis in the South and what is recommended by the CADTM?

26 January 2024 - by Eric Toussaint, Maxime Perriot

Maxime Perriot: In an article published in December 2023 you claimed in the wake of a World Bank report that “developing countries” were trapped in a new debt crisis, yet the Financial Times and other sources point out that in the first two weeks (...)
Budget 2024: ‘Deep Marketisation’ in Sri Lanka

19 December 2023 - by Balasingham Skanthakumar

Ranil Wickremesinghe’s Budget for 2024 had safe passage on third reading on 13 December as expected, with a majority of 41 votes in the 225-member legislature. The Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP—People’s Front) with its rotten majority in (...)
“Developing countries” are trapped in a new debt crisis - World Bank : How can this be explained?

18 December 2023 - by Eric Toussaint

The latest World Bank report on the debts of “developing countries”, published on December 13, 2023, reveals an alarming fact: in 2022, developing countries as a whole spent a record US$ 443.5 billion to pay for their external public debt. The 75 (...)
Let’s not be fooled by Kristalina Giorgeva and the IMF

5 December 2023 - by Maxime Perriot

In an interview given to Marie Charrel for Le Monde on 12 November 2023, Kristalina Georgieva, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), displays once again the total disconnect between the thinking of the IMF, current (...)
Unveiling the Veil

1 December 2023 - by BNN

World Bank and IMF: Protectors of Global Economic Order? Éric Toussaint’s book, “Banque mondiale: une histoire critique” offers a scathing critique of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), two institutions born out of the (...)
A Budget to dismember state universities

30 November 2023 - by Ahilan Kadirgamar

Sri Lanka is going through its worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and the stabilisation policies of the Government could drastically change the political economic landscape of the country. Amidst these changes underway, education more (...)
International Implications of Sri Lanka’s IMF Solution

8 November 2023 - by Ahilan Kadirgamar

Last year, Sri Lanka exploded into international attention with severe shortages of fuel and food, and tremendous protests. While the uprising chased away the President, the Rajapaksa-led illegitimate parliament elected Ranil Wickremesinghe as (...)
Working People, IMF and Regime of Repression

12 October 2023 - by Ahilan Kadirgamar

Sri Lanka’s economy is now on autopilot. The Government – emasculated of making any economic policies – is merely following the IMF and the World Bank. Sri Lanka’s Finance Ministry may as well sit in Washington, or all the same it can be in Colombo (...)
“Austerity driven economic reforms affect women more than men”

14 September 2023 - by Balasingham Skanthakumar, Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky, Lakmali Hemachandra

Dr. Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky was the United Nations Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) Independent Expert on foreign debt and human rights between June 2014 and April 2020. He was previously a sovereign debt expert of the United Nations Conference on (...)
Chile: 50 years after the disgrace Neoliberalism at gun point

7 September 2023 - by Eric Toussaint, Roberto González Amador

The coup against the government of Chile’s constitutionally elected president Salvador Allende, which marks its fiftieth anniversary this year, brought to a brutal and violent stop the course of several Latin American countries towards welfare (...)