Jeffrey Sommers Austerity

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In Austerity and social (in)security in Latvia¸ Jeffrey Sommers provides a convincing analysis of Latvia’s experiment with austerity. Following the global economic crisis of 2008, there has been wide debate over the role of austerity measures in promoting recovery, an ap-proach that has been implemented in countries across Europe such as Britain, Spain, and Greece. It is in this context that Latvia has been held up as a role model by Anders Aslund and former Latvian Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis, who defends his program of cuts and argues for other countries to emulate Latvia in the book How Latvia came through the Financial Crisis. It is this “myth” that Sommers seeks to dismantle. Sommers achieves this by firstly refuting the argument …show more content…

Secondly, Sommers demonstrates the disastrous social consequences of poverty, emigration and even rising health problems that have resulted from the cuts pro-gramme, and finally he argues that behind the apparently promising recovery of the Latvian economy the country has “ignored real economic development”. This essay therefore serves both as an economic rejection of austerity and an analysis of the social and political situation surrounding austerity in Latvia and an influential contribution to the debate about it.
Sommers begins his work by taking apart the claim by Dombrovskis that austerity was chosen “by a mature electorate… voluntarily”. In response to claims that there was a broad national consensus in favour of austerity, Sommers emphasises the unique political situation in Latvia which allowed the pro-austerity Unity party to win two elections despite a lack of support for their destructive policies. In the face of the ethnically Russian “Harmony Centre” party seeking to make gains, issues of nationalism and race took centre stage in campaigning as ethnic Latvians were rallied to the Unity platform. The …show more content…

Poverty has increased by 158%, and income inequality has become one of the high-est in Europe. Despite Dombrovskis’ claim that the “austerity program was aimed at main-taining social assistance to the poor and pensioners, while cutting salaries of well-to-do minis-ters”, the austerity program and the tax system that was introduced was deeply regressive. With particularly severe cuts to health spending, there has been a visible increase in suicides and infant mortality, supporting the argument of David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu that “Aus-terity Kills”. Given this bleak social context, it is no wonder that Latvia has seen such high levels of emigration of working-age people, 14% of which have left the country since the start of the century. Dombrovskis has little response to this, ignoring the social effects and at-tempting to justify the cuts to health and education on the grounds of necessary restructuring, a weak reply to the statistical evidence that Sommers convincingly

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