A/HRC/38/33 V. Conclusions and recommendations Centrality of IMF 55. IMF is the single most influential international actor not only in relation to fiscal policy but also to social protection, even if both it and its critics might prefer that this were not the case. Even for high income economies, its Article IV surveillance reports and its research frame much of the broader debate. IMF deserves credit for recent policy reforms through which it has acknowledged that it is much more than a monetary agency, although concrete change on the ground has been slower to take effect. Social protection as genuinely macro-critical 56. Fiscal sustainability is important, but it can be made compatible with the gradual introduction of broad-based systems of social protection, which in turn ensure the social sustainability of the overall situation. Social protection reduces the economic drain of emergency care, expands employment capabilities, facilitates educational opportunities for the children of the poor and helps to break the cycle of dependency. There are many social protection issues that should be dealt with by other organizations and should remain off the radar of IMF, but unless it more consistently promotes the creation of fiscal space for social protection, there is little that other actors can or will do. 57. Given the impact of IMF policies, it is indispensable that the internal review currently under way examines ways in which it could actually evaluate the impact of its interventions on the bottom income quintile. Beyond modified neoliberalism 58. If IMF is to respond effectively in the years ahead to the challenges in a world in which both globalization and liberal democracy are increasingly under attack, it will need a different mindset from the modified neoliberalism that currently sets the parameters of its thinking, even as it talks about gender, inequality and social protection. Those concerns will not be truly integrated within its mission unless they are embraced as matters of principle and not just pragmatically-driven sideshows. Beyond targeting for its own sake 59. IMF insists that it does not insist on ever-more-precise targeting of social beneficiaries. That claim is difficult to support given the evidence available to the Special Rapporteur. However, given that the scientific literature now highlights the failures of the proxy means tests used in most such targeting, it is essential that IMF rethink its approach and acknowledge that excessively narrowly targeted social protection ensures that there will be, at best, weak political support for any resulting policies. Embracing diversity 60. Institutions are also the sum of their parts and the elite and highly specialized nature of IMF is reinforced by the composition of its staff. If it is to become less inward-looking, less obsessively self-referential and more genuinely engaged, it needs diversity within. 61. First, half of around its 2,400 staff members are economists, almost all of whom have been trained in the subfield of macroeconomics.125 Between 1980 and 2000, 74 per cent of all senior staff appointees had been educated in the United States of America or the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and 40 per 125 See www.imf.org/external/about/staff.htm. 17