Auditing Economic Policy for Human Rights: A Guide for Activists and Advocates

By Radhika Balakrishnan, Diane Elson, James Heintz and Jonah Walters.

Macroeconomic policy affects all of us, no matter how removed our lives seem to be from the heights of the policy-making elite. Macroeconomics is the branch of economics that studies the behavior and performance of an economy as a whole. It focuses on the aggregate changes in the economy such as unemployment, rate of growth of Gross Domestic Product and inflation. The prices of the goods we buy, the wages we earn at work, the working conditions we endure, the level of unpaid work we perform, the quality of the public services, including medical care, we access, even how long we live—all these things, to a certain extent, are shaped by macroeconomic policy. Understanding and intervening in macroeconomic policy, then, is a key priority for activists concerned with building a more just and equitable world. The realization of rights is fundamentally a political struggle for a different social and economic order. This guide proposes a human-rights-based approach to auditing economic policy.