The continuity of the International Financial Institutions’ policies: The Example of Social Welfare (In French)

The main consequence of globalization is to accelerate the process of concentrating the wealth all around the world. Nevertheless, it did not contribute to solve the contradictions of capitalism which is not able to boost a long-time accumulation. Therefore, there are tremendous pressures to privatize the public services and the systems of Social Welfare, which are now regarded as sectors of potential profit. The great international financial institutions are urging the developed countries and are forcing the under-developed ones to reform their Health and Pension systems in order to achieve a partial or total liberalization/privatization. These reforms are said to be undertaken to preserve the financial balance of the Health insurance funds and the state sponsored redistribution pension scheme which are supposedly threatened by demographic evolution, whereas private systems would be safe from this threat. We shall deal with this topic and show how far from being scientific the argument in favor of the dismantlement of Social Welfare proves to be. We shall show as well that the demographic evolution implies necessarily a modification in the distribution of the incomes at two different and hierarchically arranged levels : firstly, within the added value between wages and incomes of capital, then within total wages themselves between direct wages and benefits from Social Welfare.