IMF’s Social Protection between Rhetoric and Action: The Case of Egypt

Abstract: A substantial body of literature has been produced about the IMF’s drift away from neoliberal orthodoxy in the aftermath of the 2007/08 global financial crisis. This article assesses the degree to which the IMF’s post-crisis change in discourse toward adding more emphasis on social protection was put into action in Egypt’s 2016 economic reform program. Beyond a noticeable discursive change, our research found that there was very little—if any—practical change. First, we demonstrate how the social component of the program was much smaller than the neoliberal or ‘business-as-usual’ component, not only as a share of program measures but also in terms of their magnitude. Second, we found that even this small component had a very similar equivalent in the last major program between the IMF and Egypt in 1991, thus rendering it less novel, and therefore casting doubt on the IMF’s claims of change.