End Austerity for Jobs and Public Services

After the pademic, governments are implementing budget cuts that undermine their capacity to provide education, healthcare, social protection and other public services.

The Global Social Justice report End Austerity: A Global Report on Budget Cuts and Harmful Social Reforms in 2022-25 shows that 85 per cent of the world’s population lives in the grip of austerity measures by 2023 (143 countries including 94 developing nations). This trend is likely to continue until at least 2025, when 75 per cent of the global population (129 countries) could still be living under these conditions.

A long list of austerity measures is being implemented by governments worldwide:

• Targeting and rationalizing social protection (“safety nets”) in 120 countries, cutting benefits and programs for women, families or persons with disabilties, at a time when governments should be scaling up (not scaling down) social protection;
• Wage bill cuts or caps in 91 countries, reducing or freezing the salaries and number of public-sector workers who provide essential services to the population (e.g. teachers, health workers, civil servants at the local level);
• Eliminating subsidies (fuel, food, agriculture) in 80 countries, despite record-high food/fuel prices;
• Privatization/Commercialization of public services (often called "SOE Reforms") in 79 countries;
• Pension and Social Security reforms in 74, adjusting/reducing benefits and entitlements;
• Reducing employers’ contributions to Social Security (”tax wedge”) in 47 countries as a way to support enterprises, at the cost of workers, compromising social security sustainability;
• Labor flexibilization reforms in 60 countries, reducing employment protections;
• On the revenue side, VAT increases on basic goods and services that will negatively affect people –and which may further contract economic activity– in 86 countries;
• Promoting PPPs in 55 countries;
• Fees for Public Services in 28 countries.

These austerity policies have negative social impacts on their populations, especially harming women, and must be avoided by policy-makers. 

Instead of harmful austerity measures (or “fiscal consolidation”), governments must urgently identify alternative financing options to support their populations that are coping with multiple and compounding crises from health, energy, finance and climate shocks to unaffordable living costs.

Join the EndAusterity Campaign to stop cuts to public services, wages, pensions and social protection. There are alternatives that can ensure a people’s recovery, with education, health, welfare, decent jobs and a fairer economy for all.

• Click here to read a press release which includes the launch of this report and the launch of the End Austerity Campaign.
• Click here to watch the launch of this report and the launch of the End Austerity Campaign, with Sharan Burrow, Jayati Ghosh, Isabel Ortiz, Cephas Lumina, Roberto Bissio, J.P. Bohoslavsky and others. 
• Click here to read a summary on budget cuts and austerity reforms in 2022-25
• Click here to read a brief on nine alternatives to prevent austerity cuts
• Click here to read about what citizens can do to end austerity
• Read the Marrakech Declaration to End Austerity, sent to Ministers of Finance and Directors at the IMF and the World Bank on 2 Oct 2023.