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CEPR’s 25 Greatest Hits

July 30, 2024

  1. We played a leading role in launching and winning a successful campaign for the largest-ever allocation of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) by the International Monetary Fund; this provided a record $209 billion of aid in 2021 to developing countries (not including China, which cannot use them). This was more than all of the overseas development aid (ODA) from major developed donor countries; more than all of the climate aid that they received; and had a major positive impact on developing countries during the pandemic, likely saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Importantly, these reserve assets– unless much of ODA, and IMF loans, had no debt and no conditions attached to them.
  2. We predicted the collapse of the housing bubble and the economic crisis and recession that followed.
  3. We refuted the false and widely reported narrative that the 2019 Bolivian election was stolen; showing that the overthrow of Bolivia’s democratically elected, first indigenous president Evo Morales was actually a coup d’etat, led in large part by the Organization of American States Secretary General Luis Almagro, and supported by the Trump Administration. As a result of our work, after June 7, 2020 the major media stopped reporting the false narrative that the election was stolen.
  4. We helped keep Social Security from being privatized by exposing the hype of the “Phony Crisis”.
  5. Our Scorecard series documented the historic 20+ year economic growth failure in the great majority of low- and middle-income countries. From 1980 to 2000, the vast majority of developing countries suffered a sharp slowdown in per capita income growth; and in progress on reducing infant, child, and adult mortality, life expectancy, and on other social indicators. Much of this appeared to result from harmful changes in economic policy that was promoted by the United States and “institutions of global governance” that Washington and its allies control. The developing world returned most of the way to the progress of the pre-1980 period in the first decade of the 21st century, with most of the reduction in extreme poverty driven by China, as it grew to be the largest economy in the world while pursuing very different development policies than most of the developing world had acquired.
  6. We documented the United States’ outlier status as a “no-vacation” nation for the working class.
  7. We documented the real human consequences of US economic sanctions, including tens of thousands of deaths; and changed the policy debate on these sanctions to the point where members of the US Congress, including leadership, opposed US sanctions on the grounds that they deliberately targeted, as well as increased poverty and deaths among, the civilian population.
  8. We wrote the book on how private equity makes its billions by looting companies and killing jobs.
  9. We led the successful CSO efforts to stop the expansion of harmful policies at the World Trade Organization (WTO) including deals on digital trade. We helped stop the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) from coming into existence, preventing further corporate takeover of public and private services in 50 countries worldwide.
  10. We helped found the Fed Up campaign to reform Fed practices by putting equal focus on unemployment and inflation.
  11. We demonstrated that the OAS arbitrarily – without a recount or even a statistical analysis – overturned Haiti’s first round Presidential election results in the 2010 vote. Our tracking of the aid and reconstruction process in Haiti raised very serious questions and concerns, and highlighted significant shortcomings that directly led to reform via the Assessing Progress in Haiti Act, which was signed into law and greatly increased aid transparency and accountability.
  12. We led a coalition pushing for Full Employment for All and showed how a targeted jobs program can help address chronic joblessness in disadvantaged urban and rural communities.
  13. We exposed the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)’s central role in a massacre of indigenous villagers in Honduras, starting in 2012, as confirmed by a joint Department of Justice and Department of State Inspector General’s review (prompted by our investigation and Congressional advocacy). This helped lead to the suspension of some forms of US support for Honduran counternarcotics activities, several official investigations and a debate on US drug policy in Honduras and beyond.
  14. We got the Public Editor of the New York Times to come out in favor of changing the way the paper reports on the budget, putting huge numbers in a context where they were meaningful to readers.
  15. We showed that IMF policies were a main cause of Argentina’s 1998-2002 depression, and then correctly predicted that the Argentine government’s policies would be successful after it broke with the IMF. We showed how the IMF’s largest loan agreement ever, for $57 billion to Argentina in 2018, damaged the economy and once again changed the trajectory of Argentina’s economic and political future.
  16. We called out the practice of “surprise” medical billing leading to the passage of the No Surprises Act in December 2020.
  17. We played a major role in organizing a years-long effort that forced the IMF and World Bank to stop imposing user fees– which the Bank had promoted for decades – for primary health care and education thus enabling millions of children in poor countries to get access to these basic needs for the first time.
  18. We developed a comprehensive policy agenda for addressing the impact of Long COVID, in conjunction and consultation with the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center and patient-led expert groups, and documented the “long reach” of Long COVID among working-age people in the US.
  19. We examined IMF agreements in 41 countries during the global recession of 2009, and found that 31 of them had pro-cyclical macroeconomic policies attached to them that would have been expected to worsen economic downturns.
  20. We pointed out that adults, many with kids, would benefit from a higher minimum wage–not just teenagers. And we showed that customer tips are, in part, a wage subsidy to employers in states that allow payment of a subminimum wage to tipped workers.
  21. We have documented and brought attention to US intervention that destabilized and sometimes even helped overthrow democratically elected governments in this hemisphere in the 21st century. These included Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Paraguay, Honduras, Haiti (see above), and others.
  22. We showed that volatile work hours increase poverty and harm children.
  23. We analyzed the implementation of a set of policies that transformed Europe in the first decade of the 21st century in ways that gave Europeans, at least within the Eurozone, less control over economic policy than people in the United States have, and therefore undermined democracy and living standards there. We showed how this led to more than an additional year of crisis and recession (as compared with the US) during the Great Recession; and how the European authorities used this crisis to impose deeply unpopular neoliberal policy changes that especially targeted the more vulnerable countries of the Eurozone (especially Greece, but also Spain, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, and others). These included changes that weakened collective bargaining and cut parts of Europe’s social safety net, including health care and pensions. Many of the problems that Europe faces today stem at least partly from the economic insecurity and political instability that resulted from these changes.
  24. We advocated for major changes to catastrophe insurance in the face of increased climate change-related weather events.
  25. We showed that Latin America’s most significant integration project of the last two decades – the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) – continues to have active legal status despite years of inactivity due to past regional political divisions as well as US intervention, thus triggering and contributing to a multilateral effort to relaunch the body.

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