There’s no question that we are at the start of a debt crisis that’s certain to worsen dramatically in the coming years. Debt service obligations to multilateral, bilateral and private creditors directly reduce available funding for already under-resourced shock absorbers, social protections (including those that support women’s workforce participation and caring labor), public investment and investments in physical and social infrastructures that support growth and gender equality. Moreover, as in previous financial and debt crises, support from the Bretton Woods institutions (BWIs) is conditioned on austerity programs that entail, among other things, fiscal consolidation, public expenditure reductions, increased consumption and value-added taxes, user fees (that can restrict educational access for girls), and measures that contract public sector employment.
Constraints on fiscal space are already being felt anew across the Global South. Deeper constraints surely lie ahead. Indeed, there’s ample evidence that the austerity agenda has arrived, and it appears likely to be more severe than that associated with the crisis of the 1980s. Constraints on fiscal space and economic crises are always borne disproportionately by women, as per decades of research by feminist economists.