INTRODUCTION

A new body of scholarship is emerging, under the banner of a “Rights-Based Economy” (RBE). An important part of its agenda is to seek to ensure that macroeconomic and fiscal policies support the realization of human rights. For some, it is the opposite of austerity: it consists of increasing the purchasing power of the poor and ensuring that labour receives a larger proportion of the value created in the economy, with the benefits of growth being spread more equally. For others, we need to go beyond Keynesian recipes and invent a post-growth economy. In this chapter, I try to show how human rights offers a way beyond that opposition, which often makes it difficult to forge alliances across different components of the progressive camp.

In a paper exploring the positions of the United Nations’ Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), Petel and Vander Putten (2021) note that the committee remains wedded to economic growth as a means to ensure the progressive realization of these rights. This should not come as a surprise. The idea that the realization of economic and social rights and poverty reduction require economic growth seems intuitive. It fits neatly within mainstream macroeconomic debates between the fiscally conservative, often found to the right of the political spectrum, and those, coming more often from the left, who argue for demand-driven solutions. For the former group, fiscal consolidation is a precondition for sustainable economic growth over the long term. For the latter, austerity kills growth. It is only by raising the incomes of lower-income earners and the middle class that output will be stimulated to increase and investors to invest. Both agree that growth is needed but disagree on the best way to achieve it.

The reign of this orthodoxy can be readily explained. To redistribute wealth and thus alleviate poverty, there must first be wealth created to redistribute. Moreover, growth is generally seen to hold the promise of employment creation, since poverty cannot be tackled by social protection alone but requires the active population to be provided with jobs – allowing, in turn, for their income from work to be taxed and their social contributions to finance insurance schemes.