Rethinking Economic Policy for Social Justice : The radical potential of human rights

The dominant approach to economic policy has so far failed to adequately address the pressing challenges the world faces today: extreme poverty, widespread joblessness and precarious employment, burgeoning inequality, and large-scale environmental threats. This message was brought home forcibly by the 2008 global economic crisis.

Rethinking Economic Policy for Social Justice shows how human rights have the potential to transform economic thinking and policy-making with far-reaching consequences for social justice. The authors make the case for a new normative and analytical framework, based on a broader range of objectives which have the potential to increase the substantive freedoms and choices people enjoy in the course of their lives and not on not upon narrow goals such as the growth of gross domestic product. The book covers a range of issues including inequality, fiscal and monetary policy, international development assistance, financial markets, globalization, and economic instability. This new approach allows for a complex interaction between individual rights, collective rights and collective action, as well as encompassing a legal framework which offers formal mechanisms through which unjust policy can be protested.

This highly original and accessible book will be essential reading for human rights advocates, economists, policy-makers and those working on questions of social justice.

Radhika Balakrishnan is the Faculty Director at the Center for Women’s Global Leadership, and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, USA.

James Heintz is the Andrew Glyn Professor of Economics and Associate Director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA.

Diane Elson is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, Visiting Professor at the Centre for Research on Women in Scotland’s Economy at Glasgow Caledonian University, and Research Associate of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University, USA.