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Hemmed In: Responses to Africa's Economic Decline
Thomas M. Callaghy and John Ravenhill, editors
New York
1993
2. The IMF and the World Bank in Africa: How Much Learning?
R EGINALD H ERBOLD G REEN
| The small boy breaks a pot [and] goes to tell his mother "It got broken," not "I broke the pot" but "It got broken." And who did this? We did. We broke the pot. |
| --Jerry John Rawlings, Head of State, Ghana |
| Adjustment programmes which rend the Fabric of Society cannot be sustained. |
| --E.V.K. Jaycox, VIce President (Africa), World Bank |
| We cannot get into the habit of living on handouts. |
| President Joaquim Chissano, Mozambique |
The Road to Stabs and SAPS
In 1993, one may be forgiven for thinking that trends in development, growth, food supply, and the human condition in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), both continentally and nationally, have always been perceived as disasters. One might also suppose that external involvement and, consequently, national economic policy and strategy have been formed in the context of highly conditional, basically (if unevenly) neoliberal Stabilization Programs (Stabs) and Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPS). This is in fact an example of "always" being a very short period-one decade. Hence a historical perspective is needed, not least because, by their previous policies, the Bank, and to a lesser degree the Fund, are among Chairman Rawlings's "we" who broke the pot.
In the 1960s, growth of output and exports was above population growth both regionally and for most countries in SSA. 1 After about 1965, food production probably lagged behind population growth. 2 But this was not truly realized as a trend, as opposed to a crisis period, until the 1980s. 3 Deficiencies in human conditions (income distribution, health, education, malnutrition, employment) were perceived as severe but improving, being supposedly closely correlated with, and resulting from, growth. Broadening the colonial policy of state intervention and strengthening the colonial pattern of top-down technical and administrative structures were widely viewed as a matter of course by capitalist as well as socialist decisionmakers, analysts, and aid agencies.
The period 1970-79 was a poor one for most Sub-Saharan economies, especially in overall growth. 4 The reason is unclear because focusing on the 1970s as a whole obscures the presence of three distinct average periods: 1970-73, 1974-75, 1978-79. The period 1974-75 was a period of short-term crises (drought, import prices-far more broadly than just petroleum, fiscal imbalance, and threats to public service maintenance) for most SSA economies. But a majority of countries were able to cope well because external bridging aid and low conditionality IMF funding (plus import support from the World Bank) rose; the drought cycle turned; terms of trade improved as industrial economies and world trade returned to rapid growth; and guaranteed export credits and commercial finance became available on an unprecedented scale (albeit unequally by country). 5 As a result, 1976-79 were years of rapid (on average over 5%) output growth, public service revival, and the formulation of ambitious new targets. The negative export volume and low food production growth rates, as well as rising ratios of debt service to exports and of external to total investment finance, were not fully recognized. When noted, they were viewed as correctable trends.
Concern for human welfare (then styled "employment" or "basic needs") began to grow. 6 Growth was bypassing majorities and basic service access was very uneven (by country and within countries), which came to be widely accepted as a basic problem of most national development strategies. But, with a few exceptions (such as Tanzania whose 1967 Arusha Declaration 7 did mark a strategic shift toward basic needs production and provision), little coherent program formulation, let alone implementation, emerged before the crises of the 1980s, which engulfed all but a handful of SSA economies. The year 1980, unlike 1970 or even 1973-74, does appear to mark a turning point. Terms of trade (measured on a 1975-79 base) fell precipitously; commercial 8 and export credit dried up; and the full impact of slow food production growth on urban provisioning in drought years became brutally clear. Import compression (often strangulation) had a negative multiplier effect on output (and even on exports); fiscal crises led to a deterioration of basic services (in some cases to the point of virtual collapse); and government policy became a series of exercises in crisis management. Attempts to cope in the basically successful 1974-75 manner now failed. Persistence with these strategies can be seen, in retrospect, to have aggravated the underlying problems. Thus 1980-81 marked continued decline for economies already in decline (e.g. Ghana), failure for those attempting to break out of stagnation through massive increases in investment financed by external debt (e.g. Togo, Malagasy Republic), and a false start for those seeking to rerun 1974-75 type bridging programs (e.g. Tanzania).
In the late 1970s, SSA states had requested a World Bank study on the reasons why their growth (then running at about 5% a year, 9 albeit unevenly by country, and after a poor 1970-73 and depressed 1974-75) was so slow. Late in 1981, the Accelerated Development (AD) report appeared. 10 It had the impact of a bombshell. As a senior official of a highly successful African economy put it, "We asked for bread and they chucked a stone at us."
In brief, AD argued:
In detail, AD was less stark. It did cite historical and external problems; listed dozens of other agricultural issues; praised a few government departments and public enterprises; and devoted some attention to health and education as human investments. But these were tack-ons, the result of bargaining within a committee written document. The core was hard neo-liberalism and was put bluntly as the authorized version of what to do. SSA countries would have to follow this agenda in order to get significant Bank finance beyond a decreasing number of project loans. This would be especially true if one wanted Bank support (via a Consultative Group) in mobilizing the doubled external resource inflows which the Bank, in AD, and subsequently, viewed as essential if SSA growth in the 1980s was to be as high as that of the population.
African terms of trade-excluding oil-declined through the 1980s with limited and brief exceptions. Even oil (the largest single export) fared very badly on a trend basis. 11 Furthermore, when emergency food aid (no one, reasonably enough, predicted the drought cycles) is excluded, net resource transfers to SSA divided by import prices stagnated after 1982 at levels little above those of 1981. 12 This is a far cry from AD's call for doubling. Therefore, on AD's own projections SSA should have enjoyed a falling per capita output in the 1980s (as it did) even if every country had adopted staunchly neo-liberal strategies in 1982 (as they did not).
Continuity in Adversity: The IMF in Sub-Saharan Africa
The IMF operates on a model projecting and seeking to regulate aggregates like output, exports, imports, government revenue, and expenditure and credit in monetary (not real volume) terms. 13 In this model there is no formal analytical connection between monetary and real volume magnitudes. There are no production functions. Indeed, the model virtually assumes no change in real output over a one- to three-year standby (SBA) period. Growth is plugged in as an estimate from outside the model in Extended Facility projections.
Therefore, the Fund is in the stabilization business: reducing external, fiscal, banking, exchange rate, and price imbalances, and doing so by cutting absorption of domestic production and imports into private consumption, public services, and investment. Drops in real wages, cuts in real public spending (except on external debt service), lower real credit for enterprise working capital (a de facto result, not an explicit goal), sharp devaluation, and high real interest rates are the main instruments sought in practice. Import liberalization, formerly a Fund theme, is now more a Bank than a Fund operational priority.
The IMF, by its own assertion, is not in the development or growth business, although it is in the business of lending (typically at about 8% with six years to repay, including three years of grace) relatively small bridging or external arrears reduction financing. It urges demand reduction to create a new, lower but stable base from which growth/development can then be resumed.
The performance checks ("trigger clauses"), default on which halts disbursements, relate to total bank credit, bank credit to the government (and often selected enterprises), and external arrears and/or reserves. Caps on nominal wage increases, and floors on real interest rates are often only slightly less explicit conditions.
The Fund's power does not depend on its net lendings (drawings), which have been quite low over 1980-88 and negative to SSA from 1987. It arises because a highly conditional agreement with the Fund is a precondition for a Bank structural adjustment program, a Paris Club (official creditors) debt rescheduling and for enhanced bilateral assistance.
From 1985, the Fund has moved to low interest, medium term (up to 10 years to repay), Structural Adjustment and Extended Structural Adjustment Facilities. 14 In practice, these roll over earlier standby and extended facilities.
The problems with the Fund's approach are well researched: 15
The Fund is by no means unaware of these criticisms. Nor is it totally unsympathetic. For example, it now agrees that for real interest rates of +5% to -5%, there is little empirical evidence that savings are much affected. 16 In fact, its data for SSA over 1974-85 show three countries with slightly above trend line Capital Formation/Growth ratios and four below. The four below include two with somewhat negative rates. This casts doubt on the short and medium term allocative efficiency argument for positive real interest rates, more so than the Fund's somewhat grudging admission that it may be small. Indeed, the Fund agrees in principle that slower devaluation, higher credit ceilings, and rising personal and government consumption would be desirable during adjustment. But it argues (correctly) that this would require much higher levels of interim grant or very soft loan finance, and that this is not available (to date, usually also correctly). With respect to constructing estimates of credit needs, it argues that this would be difficult (true) and would prevent credit control (less evident), while admitting that certain productive sectors in some SSA countries have had real output needlessly constrained by credit ceilings.
Increasingly, Fund stabilization is being seen as not merely less than complementary to Bank adjustment with growth, but in antagonistic contradiction to it (a view that Bank officials dare not state overtly but rather implicitly confirm by referring to conflicts, and in some cases leaning on the Fund when the country and the Bank have agreed on a structural adjustment framework). 17
Furthermore, before the emergence in 1986-89 of the Structural Adjustment Facility (SAF) and Extended Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF), Fund finance had been too short term and at too high an interest rate for countries needing prudent structural adjustment (as several of them and the Bank have explicitly stated). The problem is that SBAs or Extended Fund Facilities (EFFs) provide bridging finance for external and fiscal imbalances assured to be correctable in 18 to 36 months. However, no one now seriously supposes that this applies to most SSA economies. Indeed, even the Structural Adjustment Report did not make any such claim: witness its call for doubled external resource inflows and thus acknowledgment of a broadening trade imbalance. 18 Therefore, one may argue that the IMF has lent to SSA far too much and for the wrong purposes. That criticism is reinforced in cases such as the Sudan, Zambia and Ghana where hundreds of millions in IMF drawings have been used basically to reduce or hold down (temporarily in the first two instances) commercial arrears and arrears to other debt holders.
It is possible to sketch the IMF approach in fairly broad brush and static (or stable, continuous) terms because the IMF has not structurally adjusted its approach to stabilization in SSA or elsewhere since 1980, except to increase conditionality and to create special financing through the SAF and the ESAF. But these were undertaken to bail the Fund out of more defaults and to avert disaster for countries whose structural adjustment programs (including external finance) were on course if, and only if, they could avoid having to make large net repurchases from (i.e. repayments to) the Fund. They are thus reactive and limited, not proactive and general.
The results are only slightly less difficult to characterize. No Fund program without a parallel Bank/bilateral structural adjustment program has succeeded since the late 1970s, if success means just restored external balance and resumed growth of GDP above that of output. In some stabilization/structural adjustment contexts (e.g. Ghana (ESAF), Fund finand Gambia), Fund finance has played a useful bridging role. 19 But this role has served to secure higher Bank/bilateral flows rather than to restore trade balances. And, in these cases, SAF/ESAF have come just in time to roll the bridge into longer term, lower interest funding before repayment would have capsized the programs. In other cases (e.g. Tanzania, Nigeria, and Rwanda), little Fund money has been used because these countries (and the Bank) deemed this too costly and, moreover, too short term to be any large part of the answer, rather than exacerbating the debt problem.
Accelerated Development to Structural Transformation with Sustainable Growth
The Bank's record is much harder to summarize. The Bank shapes its programs to the local context more, and is less monolithic-and even, at times, less internally consistent-in approach than the Fund. It does learn from experience and change course, even if rarely admitting it makes mistakes (a reticence damaging to its credibility). It has, in fact, engaged in a thoroughgoing structural adjustment of structural adjustment.
With respect to privatization of enterprises, the Bank has de facto retreated 20 to a pragmatic line. Efficiency (in real output and real resource costs as well as profits) is the key and is acceptable through better public enterprise management, autonomy, and accountability or joint ventures, as well as by closure or sale. But it contends (correctly) that many SSA public enterprises are very inefficient and/or have investment requirements that the state cannot meet. Therefore, doing fewer things but doing them better would be preferable. The problem of overoptimism as to the availability of foreign and domestic entrepreneurs remains, as does a certain insensitivity to the economic costs (surplus outflow and reinvestment abroad) as well as political costs of foreign and domestic minority (e.g. Mauritanian, Lebano-Syrian, Indian, Somali) takeovers.
In the case of user fees, the Bank is much more open to the charge of gross ideological bias; one, incidentally, that dates at least to the early 1970s. Indeed, its enthusiasm for universal primary health care and universal basic education, taken with its own findings that many (up to 50% in some countries) users cannot pay substantial amounts, are hard to square with its resolute championing of charges. These do deny access to poor people (even if cap and waiver schemes exist in principle); have high cost-revenue ratios; are unlikely in most cases to cover more than 10 percent of costs of services; are less progressive (and less oriented to vulnerability reduction) than would be higher import or manufacture multirate sales taxes as long as these exempted basic foods and artisanal products. (For such taxes administrative reality forces progressivity and provides an incentive to the informal sector.)
In practice, the greatest cost may be the diversion of large amounts of technicians' and decisionmakers' time to a fairly trivial issue. Some fees (e.g. Zimbabwe's health charges for those in receipt of above twice the minimum wage, and for "above normal" room and board services) do make sense and yield some revenue at low access cost. But they are no more significant to revenue or budget balancing than any other 1 to 2% of total recurrent revenue taxes or charges, and should receive no more attention. The Bank may need a shift to downgrade fees. In Mozambique, it agreed that a system devised according to its principles had drastically reduced attendance at health posts, yielded little revenue, created serious administrative and financial probity problems, and thus perhaps needed revision or even partial withdrawal. In practice, inflation is being allowed to erode it into insignificance.
On government expenditure, the Bank has reversed course. It now seeks to target real increases-up to 15 to 18% of GDP for recurrent budgets and 30% overall 21 --and to mobilize external soft funding where domestic revenue cannot reach these levels for some years. Human investment, infrastructure maintenance, and economic services are back in fashion. Government (civil service) reform is no longer merely a euphemism for "redeployment" (i.e. sacking). It now also refers to raising real wages of a smaller number of civil servants, improving skills and institutional capacity, and decreasing the number of services in order to improve performance.
Overall employment/self-employment expansion is now stress-ed as a goal, as a means to, as well as a consequence of higher output. 22 Precisely how it is to come about is less clear. In practice, actual programs to permit small-scale farmers to produce, sell, and buy more are thin on the ground, while private enterprise growth is as much an article of faith as an empirically researched projection (much less one with Korean-style support and incentive measures attached).
The Bank's faith in markets and liberalization remains undim-med in principle but has been amended to include non-price factors, and greater flexibility as to timing and modalities of liberalization. For example, the Bank's own studies suggest that only 10% of variations in agricultural 23 growth appear to relate to (official) price variations. Hence infrastructure, transport, inputs, and research and extension now feature more prominently. While the Bank still believes that much state intervention in African markets creates worse failures than non-state inspired market imperfections, the AD Report's virtual categorical opposition to selective interventions has been tempered. On trade liberalization, reality has again shifted. Efficient import substitution is now Bank-endorsed; given present primary product export prospects and food import trends, it has to be! 24 Calculated, targeted protection therefore is sometimes accepted, as is step by step liberalization. On exchange rates, the Bank tends, in public, to follow the Fund and has not really worked out when a devaluation below comparative purchasing power restoration would raise exports more than inflation.
"Shock cures" are now almost out of Bank terminology and the pace of adjustment is targeted on a balance between the dangers of institutional, social, and market damage from overly quick shifts and the difficulties of gaining large enough soft external funding for long enough to allow a less compressed time scale. With evidence of increased debilitation, more sluggish responses, and a worse than anticipated external economic environment (trade, drought, and war), there has been a steady "lengthening" of structural adjustment programs. In 1983, it was generally a three-year process, including the stabilization phase. It has gradually crept up to five to seven years after stabilization, i.e. up to ten years. This has mirrored the effort to keep the Ghana flagship program going. The program, which was to have run out in 1986, is now to expire in 1993. In fact, on this long running SAP, external balance projections do not show a closing of the current account deficit (excluding grants) until the mid-1990s. Au contraire. Thus, further lengthening can be expected, with resultant rises in "aid fatigue" by donors (who have not raised aid as much as shifted it from non-SAP to SAP countries), and "adjustment fatigue" by recipients who sometimes see GDP per capita rising slowly but at the price of massive social political and economic efforts and tensions.
But, in 1991, the Bank negotiated Zimbabwe into an SAP focused on import liberalization and a float of the exchange rate, with much more rapid changes than Zimbabwe had thought prudent. Growth collapsed, inflation spiralled, the exchange rate fell like a rock with a widening trade gap, and mounting inflation and the breakthrough on capital inflows (Zimbabwe's reason for seeking to get World Bank blessing for continuation of its own 1984-89 "in-house" SAP).
Since 1985, the Bank has been quite clear that structural adjustment is feasible only with growth. That is to say, if by the second or third year of the program GDP growth is not sustainably above that of population, it will probably be impossible to make a later breakthrough without major increases in funding. Program collapse is thus likely. Similarly, for the period 1986-89, the Bank has come (in Vice President Jaycox's words) to accept that structural adjustment programs which rend the fabric of society are not sustainable. Furthermore, the Bank has quietly resuscitated President MacNamara's thrust against absolute poverty and for human investment more generally, although it still has not internalized or programed enhanced production by poor people as a significant strategic element.
Certain procedural problems appear endemic to Bank SAPery. First, the priority public investment (PI) program is a very odd framework for government or Consultative Group action. By nature, it does not focus on policy or overall investment. Nor does it give a guide to resource inflow needs. Projections showing external needs and sources articulated by government and enterprise, and by recurrent operations and capital rehabilitation, or new investment (as used by Tanzania and, to a degree, Mozambique), would seem a more serviceable tool for Consultative Groups.
The overall Fund/Bank policy framework papers (PFPs) also pose problems. Countries have rarely taken adequate initiatives in submitting their own drafts as a basis for discussion. Too much initiative is thus left in the hands of the international financial institutions although, in fairness, some of their drafts clearly do draw on government strategy papers. The latter, in turn, have such lengthy internal negotiation and decision-making processes that little time is allocated to country study, analysis, counterproposal, and dialogue.
Most programs remain underfunded (by Bank estimates). Some have been doomed from the start for that very reason (Zambia is a clear example, and-at least for some programs-is accepted as such by the Bank). Others have had very serious lags. Luck has enabled some to survive: in Ghana in 1983, the culmination of the worst drought in recorded history, coupled with massive forced repatriation of Ghanaians from Nigeria, served as a diabolus ex machina to deflect criticism from policy. 25 In Tanzania, there had been more modest but real growth. But lags in certain key sectors-e.g. transport rehabilitation in Tanzania, industry in Ghana and Tanzania, food production in Ghana, and rather ill-managed marketing privatization to co-ops in Tanzania-are leading to new structural distortions.
A related point is "creeping conditionality." This is not so much a matter of new ultimate goals-if anything, the Bank has become less neo-liberal. Rather, it relates to shifts from down the road goals to new instant requirements (as in the case of import liberalization in Ghana in 1985-86) and the disastrous instant liberalization in Zimbabwe's 1991 SAP, which sent a previously moderately successful economy into free-fall. Just as one can argue that the longer a program enjoys some success the greater the cost to the country and to the international finance institutions of its collapse, it is arguable that this will provide countries with more negotiating power than they have utilized to date. In fact, this power has been used in Ghana and Tanzania (as well as in Mozambique, which is a rather special case because of war destruction) to considerable, if considerably unpublicized, effect.
On external factors, the Bank has adopted what could be called a "two faced," or "realistic," approach. It accepts that, whatever the causes of economic debilitation in SSA, 1980s terms of trade and primary product quantity growth trends, industrial economy protectionism, and the heaviest (relative to exports) debt overhang of any region, threaten to destroy structural adjustment efforts-as does underfunding. The Bank makes these points quite strongly to the North, especially with respect to debt relief and soft finance. This has helped change the climate so that "creeping debt write-off" is moving fairly quickly for low-income countries, a breakthrough the Bank hopes to extend to lower middle-income countries. On soft resource inflows, the Bank has raised flows to SAP countries via IDA reallocations and its Special Programme to about 8% a year since the mid-1980s. But, excluding food aid, this is primarily a reallocation from non-SAP countries. Since the Bank wishes to see adequately financed SAPs on a sustained basis in most of SSA, it is reverting back to the AD Report's call for doubled resource inflows, but this time for the 1990s as opposed to the 1980s. 26
When speaking to SSA countries, the Bank argues first that domestic reform is necessary and desirable whatever the external context and, second, that it is unsound to budget export price improvements, reductions in barriers to market access, debt write-off or aid flows until and unless they are ensured. These points are sensible, but have left SSA countries with the perception that the Bank is doing less than it actually is to make these conditions a reality. There is also the unwarranted suspicion that external debt repayment is a Bank priority when, except for its own debt, it advocates the opposite for the SAP countries. 27
The results of SAPs are, overall, predictably, unclear. There have not been enough programs running long enough and seriously enough for cross country data at one point in time, or over time, to yield clear answers. The program is aggravated by the fact that pre-SAP economic trends were in most cases both downward and below average. The Bank-UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) statistical war is waged from both sides with highly selective and less than appropriate data. On the Bank's part, category choices and shock adjustments in Africa's Adjustment and Growth in the 1980s 28 are hard to perceive as anything but rigged. That document does not serve the Bank nor SSA well. It was evidently an ill-digested or rushed review draft, devised not to pre-empt ECA's African Alternative Framework 29 (as many in SSA suspect), but to prove to donors that "structural adjustment works" as well as to reduce "aid fatigue" at the Spring 1989 Bank/Fund Development Committee Meeting.
A recent study suggests positive overall results on what appear to be reasonable projections of likely economic trajectories without SAPS. 30 However, it shows poor results on fixed investment and high social and economic costs of certain measures-e.g. mass firings, fees for basic services-with no discernible offsetting macroeconomic gains.
Looking at country cases, there are several successes: Ghana, Tanzania, Mozambique, Rwanda; perhaps Kenya, Gambia, and Senegal. There is one partial success reversed by war-Malawi. But, here, it is hard to separate out the policy shift gains from those caused by increases in net external resource inflows. Probably both have been relevant.
But there are failures: Zaire, Zambia, the Sudan, Somalia, Togo, and most recently Zimbabwe. And other cases (e.g. Uganda) are unclear because both the policies and inflows are still in an extended infancy or have been recast after years of nonsuccess, e.g. Malagasy Republic.
Modernization, Mimicry, Self-Reliance: From Lagos to African Alternatives
SSA has been slow to shift away from approaches to modernization and growth that rely merely on the intensification of investment in physical and human capital. Equally, self-reliance formulations often seem to be smudged copies of models associated with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) of the 1950s. Such models are oddly blended with copying out the Treaty of Rome as a guide to economic cooperation based on managed markets and planned economic cooperation. At least at the official level, this was true from the 1980 Lagos Plan of Action (Lagos) through the 1986 31 African Priority Programme for Economic Recovery (APPER). 32 This is, in one sense, an unfair criticism. Lagos was a start toward a strategy designed for a world context similar to the 1970s, and APPER had a chance of success assuming, first, that it had actually received the aid and debt relief estimated as needed and that, second, the 1986-88 terms of trade evolution had been positive or neutral instead of negative.
Academic and journalistic thought has had more radical (or strategy adjusting) elements, as exemplified in the work centered loosely around the Institute for African Alternatives. The problem here, however, is of another order. First, the Fund's stabilization model is equated in much of this work with the Bank's Structural Adjustment model. As this is simply not accurate, it does not advance analysis. Second, the pre-SAP declines are ignored and the whole blame for post-1980 economic debilitation is put on SAPs and Stabs-with little effort to project what would have happened had previous policies continued. Third, errors of program design and of poor negotiations by African governments are conflated with more basic analytical issues (e.g. the role of industry, optimal market intervention) in a way that often obscures rather than illuminates. Thus a dialogue of the mutually deaf (or of two prophets speaking at each other in tongues) has ensued. 33 The Bank is not unamenable to reasoned critique-both UNICEF and IDS (Sussex) obtain hearings and have some influence on thinking because the Bank perceives these agencies as putting forth serious and hard-headed analyses of Bank aims, failures, and limitations. That it does not see most SSA critics in this light is unfortunate, especially because it tends to cause SSA contacts, no matter how independent and privately critical, to be viewed as "sell-outs" or, at best, premature surrenderers ("hand uppers") who give up their principles for only marginal influence on Bank practice.
ECA's African Alternatives 34 is a step toward molding official and academic African analysis toward an African based strategic framework and, perhaps, toward setting the foundations for more serious strategic and conceptual dialogue between the Bank and SSA. It does:
Two of three post-1989 Bank priorities 35 are stressed by ECA:
The third is cited but in little concrete detail:
It seeks to achieve the above via increased domestic resource mobilization, better terms of trade and market access, and massive debt write-offs. As to instruments, it has less faith in macro monetary tools, especially in across the board devaluation (for which, rather oddly, it would substitute multiple exchange rates as opposed to a fiscal pattern of differential export subsidies and import taxes àla South Korea or Brazil).
Despite having outlined the Fund model in some detail and mistakenly calling it the Bank's model, the ECA's document 36 does raise key issues and, in some respects, is "harder" on SSA than the Bank. But is it an alternative? Except for the third, fourth, and last of these points, about which ECA is very vague, there is not much divergence on aims from the Bank's actual model. And in these cases, the practical difference in actual programs requires (and deserves) more dialogue to elucidate how wide the gap actually is. On the external front, ECA proposes no more than the Bank does; the apparent alternative is to urge SSA to act as if the changes are happening now instead of acting when (if) they take place. In short, ECA's "structural adjustment" seems to be a variant of the Bank's "structural adjustment," not a radical alternative. It does raise certain key issues for examination. Furthermore, it squarely makes the case that, as SSA moves from a three year to a ten year and maybe even a fifteen to twenty year exercise, rethinking what the strategy must include is necessary for a long term, as opposed to a short-to-medium term restructuring form of development.
Social Fabric, Human Condition: Critique or Complement?
Initially, structural adjustment-perhaps because it was seen as short-to-medium term-did not address income distribution, absolute poverty, or losers from stabilization and adjustment measures with any seriousness. Claims that poor farmers would gain and rich city dwellers would lose were, at best, pious hopes and, at worst, decorative rhetoric. 37
This, in part, flowed from political ingenuousness and little analysis of poverty. The Bank seems to find it difficult to realize that powerful and wealthy groups can protect their interests and shift themselves to benefit from new policies while unloading costs on the poor. Furthermore, it is by no means clear that the bulk of SSA agricultural exports are produced by households with below average incomes. Au contraire. A core of above-average income producers usually provide the lion's share, with a penumbra of many small low income producers furnishing the rest. And urban wage earner/informal sector real incomes fell draconically after the mid-1970s so that, by the 1980s, urban absolute poverty was an empirically and humanly (as well as perhaps politically) significant reality. 38
Ill-considered early efforts to balance recurrent budgets by cutting services, as opposed to raising taxes or grant aid, exacerbated the poverty problems, as did wholesale cuts in government/public enterprise employment. Such cuts were less common than supposed, given natural turnover and the presence of "ghost workers" to be exorcised rather than fired.
From 1985, social criticism was emphasized by-rather improbably-UNICEF. In Within Human Reach, UNICEF reasserted the human and productive 39 importance of basic services and of production by poor people. It demonstrated that they could be cost efficient, consistent with growth, and complementary to macroeconomic structural adjustment policies. Adjustment with a Human Face 40 developed these hypotheses with reference to specific structural adjustment programs, most of which showed serious avoidable deficiencies from this perspective.
The Bank-partly in response, partly as an outcome of reflection or experience, partly as a result of its own research on health, education and water units-began in 1985 to alter policy and, to a lesser extent, resource allocation:
This led to the Bank's creation of a Social Dimensions of Adjustment (SDA) unit to build a data base in order to conceptualize poverty in SSA countries, identify pressure points for reducing it, and implement minor poverty-alleviation funding. And by 1987-88, Ghana secured $75 million to set up PAMSCAD (Programme to Mitigate the Social Costs of Adjustment). By this time, however, the focus was shifting:
Tanzania and, more explicitly, Mozambique, put restoration of basic services and minimum wage protection into their strategic frameworks, thus eschewing the subsequent need to add PAMSCAD-type supplements.
At the ECA's Khartoum Conference on the Human Dimension, and in its Declaration 41 human condition improvement and especially absolute poverty reduction were analyzed seriously by African officials. Production by poor people, universal access to basic services, nutrition, women's workload, participation, and war costs were prominent themes in conference papers 42 and in the Declaration, which was later endorsed by African ministers and heads of state. In practice, MacNamara's "eradication of absolute poverty" and the ILO's "basic needs" themes had been relaunched with more emphasis on production, new language and, for the first time, serious African participation and support.
Khartoum was sharply critical of the failure of Stabs and SAPs to treat poverty, nutrition, health care, and education imbalances as just as important as fiscal and external imbalances, and their consequential failure to place redressing these imbalances at the center of strategy and resource allocation. In all fairness, the Bank could have pointed out that few SSA governments had done so either, and that PAMSCAD, for example, had been the subject of just as intense a dialogue in Ghana as with (and in) the Bank.
By 1989, the Bank, the Fund, and most bilateral donors endorsed SDA and Human Condition approaches. However, actual program articulation and resource allocations (while beginning to change) lagged well behind. How much of this is technical, how much inertial, and how much the lack of full commitment by many decisionmakers (including that of SSA proposal representatives) is still difficult to evaluate.
In 1990, 43 the Bank made poverty the theme of its annual World Development Report, and in 1991 it issued an operational directive 44 on poverty reduction, followed by a 1992 handbook 45 on how to do it-both directed to Bank staff. In Bank procedures this does represent a high level of commitment/prioritization. On the other hand it remains rather unevenly visible in many SAPs.
Brave New Worlds or Roads to New Debacles?
As noted, SSA has some successful SAPs moving into their sixth to tenth years, and has several promising younger ones. But it also has a catalogue of failures and doubtful cases. As yet, no programs other than Mauritius have made breakthroughs into rebalancing external accounts or toward restarting industrial development. The trend rate of growth of agricultural production in SSA remains at 2%-now for exports and domestic food alike-whereas both external balance and nutrition demands require 4%. 46 Even if (as seems plausible) the SAP country average is 3%, that is only about 60% of the distance to be traveled from 1970s growth to requisite trends. Non-price structural constraints (including lack of relevant knowledge, market access, adapted, tested, economically viable, and user friendly new technologies), seem harder to overcome than grossly manipulated prices or one channel marketing.
The brave new world's hopes of the AD Report have not been realized. And, in all fairness, even AD did not posit much of an increase in GDP per capita, and that only after a doubling of aid and terms of trade improvement that never took place. Overall, SSA's decline appeared to be bottoming out in the late 1980s and those countries with serious, sustained strategies (including Zimbabwe, Cape Verde and Botswana in the non-SAP group) had begun to achieve growth trends above population growth and restoration of basic services. But, except for Botswana-which has had unique advantages on the export front on which to capitalize by good policy-each of these cases was either dependent on very high, not soft, external resource inflows or in danger of its recovery being strangled by lack of access to them (e.g. Zimbabwe). Even so, the successes, limited and fragile as they were, suggest that at least several countries both within and without the SAP intensive care ward, were not necessarily on the path to new debacles.
Some guideposts to successful versus failed SAPs can be identified even though not one of them applies to all successes (or is absent in all failures):
If these are checked against successes and failures (viewed dispassionately, excluding Zaire from successes, and recognizing that some applications were gambits without any serious purpose beyond grabbing some cash and running-e.g. Sierra Leone and Liberia), most cases are explicable in these terms. This may suggest that countries should sort out strategic priorities and begin price and fiscal reforms before Stab/SAP negotiations. They do suggest that Tanzania's tactic of having its initial Consultative Group and Paris Club agreements before a final Fund standby agreement (though conditional on the latter being reached) was useful in cutting the lag from initial measures incurring costs, and the arrival of external resource flows allowing gains.
Early 1990s progress and prospects again appear more problematic with at least five at best ambiguous (or in one case clearly negative) factors:
Most SSA governments (and economies) have few degrees of freedom left. They are hemmed in by present resource levels, by poor external economic environment prospects and limited probability of any large increases in the inflow of net resources-as well as by the need to deliver perceived benefits to voters.
Learning by Doing: Lessons of Experience
What the Fund, the Bank, and individual SSA governments have learned over the period 1983-92 varies widely. There have been no sudden conversions. Ghana had tried a fairly tough bootstrap stabilization program in 1982 that restored domestic government credibility but failed to attract external support because, during the period 1972-81, external credibility was totally destroyed and the image of the new government put off many potential resource providers. Nor is it clear that long term objective divergences have narrowed all that much as yet. Tanzania and Mozambique are still basically human condition/radical social democratic in orientation, and Angola's Stab/SAP bid is actually an African Leninist or Stolypinist (to cite the earlier Czarist capitalist analogue) New Economic Policy. The Bank is very clearly devoted (as in 1981) to hard-headed capitalist development, albeit modified to seek to include poor people by overt state interventions. 47 But on short-term targets, modalities, and flexibility there has been some convergence springing from and strengthening an increasingly serious dialogue and, in some cases, allowing for fairly long-running, moderately successful programs.
The Fund has learned least, or has altered its basic thrust least. It has learned that high-cost, short-term credits are, in a structural adjustment context, part of the problem, not the solution. But, arguably, it was always aware of that; the aberration was the huge (relative to country size) drawings it advanced in several cases. Hence the Fund is now making the best of being locked in through softer, longer, more easily rolled-over SAF and ESAFs. 48
Apparently, the Fund's faith in its model is unshaken (at least institutionally; not all of its African country based officials would agree). The evident shifts include accepting that grant and soft loan finance to close trade and fiscal gaps is better than nothing and is thus acceptable. Also, in some cases, (e.g. Tanzania, Mozambique, and Angola), it accepts that standard credit ceilings run into structural constraints even if government bank borrowing is reduced to the vanishing point, although neither it nor the Bank has constructed an operational route to bypass this bottleneck. What it has not learned is that the economies in which stabilization based on the Fund model works (e.g. semi-industrialized Southern Europe) are so different from SSA that the model itself may be inapplicable in anything like its present form.
The Fund has relearned that it is not a development agency. It deploys this rather well (in its own terms) to escape responsibility for results in human, and especially women's conditions, even while advocating that countries do pay more attention to them. But it does not accept that it should retreat to refinancing old drawings through new SAFs and ESAFs and providing genuinely short term, low conditionality, fast drawings for genuinely cyclical shocks that regularly threaten basically viable structural adjustment programs. That would mean reducing itself to a marginal role in Africa and turning over most of its present macro policy functions there to the Bank. 49
The Bank, as outlined above, has learned much more. This is obscured by its habit of adding in new elements and shifting course without ever quite admitting that it has learned something or made a mistake.
Where the Bank is now most unclear is on how to transform "3 to 10 year Structural Adjustment with Growth" to "10 to 20 year Structural Transformation with Development." The long gestation of its 1989 Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth 50 exemplifies this problem. Industrial strategy, regionalism, production by poor people, and the uses or limits of efficient market intervention are among the areas in which it has learned that simplistic neo-liberal answers will not do. But it has not sorted out new, more Africa-oriented approaches.
With respect to exports, the Bank now half accepts that increasing exports of traditional primary products is a route with "no through road" and "bridge out" signs posted. It half realizes that a war to regain market share would reduce SSA export earnings while it endured, and would probably be won by exporters with financial resources to hold out (i.e. the Brazils and Malaysias, not the Ghanas and Tanzanias). But the Bank has not even begun serious research on what alternative export development strategies might work in which countries. This is perhaps the case because that route requires "picking winners" and using selective market intervention.
Ideologically, the Bank is suspicious of those routes and, pragmatically, it believes (probably correctly) that most SSA governments have little capacity to articulate or implement them competently or without massive distortions from corruption.
Oddly, the Bank has learned about the need for emergency finance better than the Fund has. But it has few means to provide it. It hopes that food aid can be used in this way and, in 1989, added $100 million to the Ghana Consultative Group target to offset cocoa price falls. Neither is as effective nor as fast as restored availability of low cost, low conditionality facilities (on the lines of the 1974 Oil Facility and the old, low conditionality use of the Compensatory Finance Facility) would be.
In the case of SSA governments, a majority have not yet transformed structural adjustment strategies as now articulated into policies and resource allocation on a multiyear basis. Most appear to have learned the following:
While many SSA governments were aware of all of the above in principle in the 1970s, at least a score, and perhaps more, know it much more acutely now from bitter experience.
Platonic Guardians or Pragmatic Partners?
The Fund, and especially the Bank, have a built-in tendency to view themselves as "Platonic Guardians" with SSA governments, other institutions, businessmen, and select academics as, at most, junior warriors (to advise marginally and implement unqualifiedly) and the rest of the Africans (and academics) as workers who are to do as told for their own good.
The Fund, full of faith in its overall monetary demand management model, is the pure Guardian. It knows best. But it is less intrusive as to details than the Bank. And if a state maintains reasonable external balance (and thus does not use Fund resources on a large scale or for extended periods), the Fund is moderately relaxed in its dialogue with it. Unfortunately, few SSA states now meet that test.
The Bank is less certain as to how much it knows, how fully, in what contexts, and with what rate of depreciation or obsolescence of knowledge stuck. It does wish to look at new data, new proposals, and new phasings, albeit subject to some acceptance of its lead role and of the need to act promptly. But its knowledge and concerns are far more extensive in scope and intensive in sectoral and micro articulation than those of the Fund. Therefore, if it faces a government in desperate need of finance with little data, limited analytical expertise, weak negotiators, and no strategy that is both plausible and backed by key national decisionmakers, it becomes a far more intrusive Platonic Guardian than the Fund.
Arguably, this is SSA governments' fault as much as that of the Bank. Consensus built on analysis and data can be created-even if at a real cost in lost time, as in Tanzania over 1981-84. Many, though by no means all, SSA governments can field teams with as much expertise and intelligence as the Bank can deploy with respect to any one country. "No, but" and "yes, except" negotiating stances (or preparing overall program discussion drafts) do yield results.
But the Bank does, even then, have two rather counterproductive habits. The first is to send a large number of sectoral program and review missions, all of which demand to see very senior people so that a wholly inefficient share of their time is allocated to meeting Bank functionaries as opposed to getting on with the job. Furthermore, the Bank has a tendency to view what it has accepted in negotiations as temporary necessities or local peculiarities to be ironed out over time in what seems to many in SSA to be creeping conditionality, not partnership.
Also, the Bank's call on SSA countries to broaden participation is both ambiguous and wildly at variance with its own patterns of operation. If participation is to mean something more than implementing policies set by someone else, it must involve representation (in both senses) before decisions are taken and accountability afterward. 51 Otherwise, it is participation in the sense of Lord Malvern's definition of partnership in Rhodesia's Nyasaland: that of horse and rider.
The Bank does not hold itself accountable to member states for bad advice, botched projects, or failure to mobilize agreed-upon, necessary funding. Nor is its tendency to seek a broad-based dialogue and information exchange in client countries manifest in the time it provides for reply to its draft documents or the restrictions it imposes on their distribution (although some progress is evident in this respect over the past few years). Finally, it is hard to see how local groups of peasants, federations of women, or trade unions can be involved in negotiations with the Bank, much less hold it accountable. As a Platonic Guardian for the poor (which the Bank on occasion seriously tries to be), it is hard to see how it can function, except by converting governments to human condition-focused strategies which, the Bank, in practice, finds hard to accept as core program components.
Yet, as the Bank stresses, SAPs must be domesticated, internalized and Africanized if they are to survive, let alone function effectively. This is possible only if the Bank accepts that there can be disagreement among informed persons of goodwill on goals as well as on specific program content. This further requires recognizing that Africans can be, and often are, experts on their own countries' economies and social and political realities. They are thus complementary or, on occasion, superior to the Bank. In principle, and with at least half its mind, the Bank would give its assent to these propositions. In practice, and emotionally, it still too often recoils from them. Partnership cannot mean total conversion of one partner to the other's views. With respect to structural adjustment in SSA, building enduring partnerships between the Bank and governments is, with few exceptions, a continuing struggle for both parties (or would-be partners).
What Is To Be Done?
If SSA economies, polities and persons are to survive, much less prosper, several key barriers must soon be addressed more effectively than they have been in structural adjustment to date:
In one sense, this agenda confirms ECA's assertion that structural adjustment must be transformed (not merely adjusted) into structural transformation by broadening its scope and lengthening its time horizon to become an overarching political and economic strategy. This contrasts with a 1981-style foundation-relaying exercise that was inherently limited in scope and duration.
It is not clear whether the World Bank's long-term policy study, From Crisis to Sustainable Growth, is a major step in this direction because the link between such documents and the Bank's operational programs is never simple and direct and may be very weak. There is also an urgent need to refine and strengthen the analytical base of ECA's African Alternatives and of the Khartoum Declaration, preferably with supporting review and input from international financial institution personnel. To date, however, the Bank side seems unlikely to demonstrate sufficient ambition, and the Africans seem to be less than adequate on the analytical front and too prone to conflate the international economic environment that would prevail in a just world with that which one might reasonably expect to obtain in the 1990s.
Breakdown, Breakout or Breakthrough?
In one sense, there is no alternative to structural adjustment. If governments do not structurally adjust their economies by planned strategic and programmatic interventions, market forces will adjust them just as structurally but at a higher cost. By December 1981, Ghana had structurally adjusted with a vengeance from December 1972 precisely because there had been no coherent economic policy for nearly a decade and an inherently wildly overdetermined one (resources overallocated) for at least three years. The period 1982-91 represents, in a basic sense, the use of a coherent strategy (albeit one amended from and by experience) to reverse much of the earlier adjustment.
However, there are possible alternative paces, instruments, sectoral emphases, and social priorities within structural adjustment. Ghana is not the Côte d'Ivoire; nor is it Kenya, Tanzania, or Mozambique, although all have serious adjustment programs. In part, this relates to historic and contextual differences, but it also involves willed choice.
An overall breakdown of structural adjustment in SSA is unlikely. Too many programs have achieved too much and, moreover, represent too much sunk capital for SSA governments and societies, international financial institutions, and donors for them to be easily scrapped or reversed.
But breakdowns-from mistakes, exogenous shocks, and underfunding-are likely to continue and competitive elections to add a new risk. That is hardly surprising. However, another category needs to be faced squarely. In some SSA countries, economic policy failure is a mirror of social and political pathology. International financial institutions and bilaterals alike have shored up these regimes by attempting (unsuccessfully) to buy economic reform while predictably failing (as in the Philippines under Marcos) to get it. A strong case exists for halting structural adjustment-type support to these governments and deploying what resource flows do go to their territories to humanitarian and survival assistance for the poor until basic political change takes place. The Fund does not operate on that logic. The Bank does if the dictatorial regime is clearly inefficient in use of resources but will not (cannot) take a lead if the economic policies practiced, narrowly defined are plausible. For example, it has dropped Zaire largely on its own initiative (as it did pre-1983 for Ghana) but has been much less operationally negative in respect to Malawi.
The chances of SSA breaking out into Asian NIC-type economic dynamism by the year 2000 are nil. Even one such case would be surprising. Neither the unlimited cheap capital, easy access to export markets for newcomers, nor the human capital bases for such a transformation exist now or can be foreseen for the coming decade. The least inconceivable contenders are Zimbabwe (given peace and rapid adjustment of the disastrous initial SAP package) and Mauritius (given deepening of its export manufacturing sector and continued/enhanced EEC market access).
A breakout on the human condition side is conceivable for perhaps a dozen countries. This requires taking seriously Adam Smith's dictum that no nation can be great and prosperous the majority of whose people are poor and miserable. The resources needed to cut absolute poverty in half and to achieve universal basic service access by the year 2000 do exist (or could exist) in up to half of the SSA states. 56
As that point illustrates, what is possible is a series of breakthroughs, some sector or target-and some country-specific. Fragility and fatigue result from steadily pushing the boulder uphill-even if, unlike that of Sisyphus in Greek mythology, the rock can, with luck, be prevented from regularly rolling all the way back to the base of the hill. That outlook is cause for limited optimism, not triumphalism, nor yet despair.
The realistic slogan for Africans-who must try to regain control over their economic destinies is the Lusophone African one:
"A lutta continua" (the struggle continues).
The optimistic one is from Pliny: "Out of Africa, there is always something new."
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Note 1: See R. H. Green, "From Deepening Economic Malaise Toward Renewed Development: Notes Toward African Agendas for Action," Journal of Development Planning 15 (April 1985). Back.
Note 2: Ibid and World Bank, Africa's Adjustment and Growth in the 1980s (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1989). Back.
Note 3: See C. Allison and R. H. Green, eds., "Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: What agendas for action?" IDS Bulletin 14, no. 1 (January 1983) and see also C. Allison and R. H. Green, eds., "Sub-Saharan Africa: getting the facts straight," IDS Bulletin 16, no. 3 (July 1985). Back.
Note 4: See World Bank, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda For Action (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1981); Green, "From Deepening Economic Malaise;" T. Rose, ed., Crisis and Recovery in Sub-Saharan Africa (Paris: OECD Development Centre, 1986). Back.
Note 5: See Green, "From Deepening Economic Malaise;" and R. H. Green, B. Van Arkadie and D. Rwegasira, Economic Shocks and National Policy Making: Tanzania in the 1970s (The Hague: Institute of Social Studies, 1981). Back.
Note 6: See International Labor Organization, Employment, Growth and Basic Needs: A One World Problem (Geneva: ILO, 1975). Back.
Note 7: (Dar es Salaam: Government Printer, 1977). Back.
Note 8: See World Bank, Toward Sustained Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Joint Program of Action (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1984); World Bank, Africa's Adjustment and Growth; and Economic Commission for Africa, Africa's Submission to the Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly on Africa's Economic and Social Crisis (New York, Addis Ababa: 1986); and UNCTAD, Trade and Development Reports (1980-1992). Back.
Note 9: See Green, "From Deepening Economic Malaise." Back.
Note 10: World Bank, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Back.
Note 11: See UNCTAD, Trade and Development Reports. Back.
Note 12: See World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1989); R. H. Green, "Africa 1975-95: The Political Boom, Decline, Conflict, Survival-and Rivalry?," UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service Occasional Paper (July 1991); UNICEF/OAU, Investing in Africa's Children (New York, Addis Ababa: UNICEF/OAU, 1992). Back.
Note 13: See J. J. Polak, "Monetary analysis of income formation and payments problems," IMF Staff Papers 6 (June 1957); J. de Laroisiére, Does the Fund Impose Austerity? (Washington, D.C.: IMF, 1984); R. H. Green, "The IMF and Stabilisation in Sub-Saharan Africa: a critical review," IDS Discussion Paper 216 (June 1986); S. Please, "Structural Adjustment, IMF Conditionality, and the World Bank" in The Hobbled Giant: Essays on the World Bank, (Boulder/London: Westview, 1984) for fuller explanation. Back.
Note 14: See P. Mistry, African Debt Revisited: Procrastination or Progress?, (The Hague: Forum on Debt and Development (FONDAD), 1991). Back.
Note 15: E.g. Mistry, African Debt Revisited; Please, "Structural Adjustment"; R. H. Green, "Political-Economic Adjustment and IMF Conditionality," in J. Williamson ed. IMF Conditionality (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1983), and Green, "The IMF and Stabilisation in Sub-Saharan Africa." Back.
Note 16: Indeed IMF Staff Papers based on its Research Department's work find limited correlations in Africa between most of its policy prescriptions (other than avoiding severe exchange rate overvaluation) and most economic or social outcome indicators. Back.
Note 17: See Please, "Structural Adjustment"; Green, "The IMF and Stabilization in Sub-Saharan Africa." Back.
Note 18: From World Bank, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa through World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa. Back.
Note 19: See on Ghana, R. H. Green, "Stabilisation and Adjustment Policies and Programmes," Country Study 1 Ghana (Helsinki: World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER), 1987) and on Tanzania during the 1984/85 crisis, Green, Van Arkadie and Rwegasira, Economic Shocks and National Policy Making. Back.
Note 20: E.g. World Bank, World Development Report (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1983-1992); and World Bank, Reducing Poverty: Handbook and Operational Directive (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1992). Back.
Note 21: World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa. Back.
Note 22: World Bank, Reducing Poverty; R. H. Green, "Towards Livelihoods, Services and Infrastructure: The Struggle to Overcome Absolute Poverty," paper at conference on the Eradication of Poverty in Africa (Ota, Nigeria: Africa Leadership Forum, July 27-29, 1992). Back.
Note 23: See K. M. Cleaver, "The Impact of Price and Exchange Rate Policies on Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa," World Bank Staff Working Papers 728 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1985); World Bank, Africa's Adjustment and Growth. Back.
Note 24: See World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa. Back.
Note 25: See Green, "Stabilisation and Adjustment Policies and Programmes;" and R. H. Green "Articulating IMF Stabilisation with Structural Adjustment in SSA Agriculture" in S. Commander ed., Structural Adjustment and Agriculture (London: ODI, 1989). Back.
Note 26: World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa. Back.
Note 27: See Mistry, African Debt Revisited; B. Onimode ed., The IMF, The World Bank and the African Debt: the Social and Political Perspectives (London: Institute for African Alternatives/Zed Books, 1989) and B. Onimode ed., The IMF, The World Bank and the African Debt, Vol.I: The Economic Impact, Vol.II The Social and Political Impact (London/New York: Zed Books, 1990); but also E.V.K. Jaycox et al, "The Nature of the Debt Problem in Eastern and Southern Africa" in C. Lancaster and J. Williamson eds., African Debt and Financing (Washington, D.C.: Institute of International Economics, 1989); World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa Back.
Note 28: World Bank, Africa's Adjustment and Growth Back.
Note 29: ECA, African Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment Programmes for Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation (New York Addis Ababa: United Nations, 1989). Back.
Note 30: F. Bourguignon and C. Morrison, Adjustment and Equity in Developing Countries: A New Approach (Paris: OECD, 1992). Back.
Note 31: OAU, Africa's Priority Programme for Economic Recovery, 1986-1990 (New York Addis Ababa: FAO for OAU, 1988). Back.
Note 32: ECA, African Alternative Framework. Back.
Note 33: See Onimode, The IMF, The World Bank and the African Debt for a fairly representative selection of proponents of this outlook (and a few dissenters from it). Back.
Note 34: ECA, African Alternative Framework. Back.
Note 35: World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa; World Bank, Reducing Poverty; and World Development Report (1990). Back.
Note 36: ECA, African Alternative Framework. Back.
Note 37: E.g. in World Bank, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Back.
Note 38: See World Bank, Reducing Poverty. Back.
Note 39: UNICEF, Within Human Reach: A Future for Africa's Children (New York: 1985). Back.
Note 40: G.A. Cornia, et al., eds., Adjustment with a Human Face: Protecting the Vulnerable and Promoting Growth, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Back.
Note 41: ECA, The Khartoum Declaration. Back.
Note 42: See R. H. Green, "The Human Dimension as the Test of and a Means of Achieving Africa's Economic Recovery and Development: Reweaving the Social Fabric, Restoring the Broken Pot," paper for the UN ECA International Conference on the Human Dimension of Africa's Economic Recovery and Development (Khartoum, Sudan: March 5-8, 1988). Back.
Note 43: World Development Report, 1990. Back.
Note 44: World Bank, Reducing Poverty. Back.
Note 46: World Bank, Africa's Adjustment and Growth; S. Commander ed., Structural Adjustment and Agriculture. Back.
Note 47: World Bank, Reducing Poverty. Back.
Note 48: See Mistry, African Debt Revisited. Back.
Note 49: Ibid; Please, "Structural Adjustment." Back.
Note 50: World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa. Back.
Note 51: World Bank, Sub-Saharan Africa; and World Bank, Reducing Poverty accept this. But World Bank, Reducing Poverty clearly takes a relatively narrow functionalist view of participation and, indeed, suggests it is inappropriate even in some (many?) poverty reduction programs. Back.
Note 52: UNICEF, The State of the World's Children (New York: 1987, 1989, 1992); R. H. Green, "Killing the Dream: The Political and Human Economy of War in Sub-Saharan Africa," IDS Discussion Paper 238 (November, 1987). Back.
Note 53: UNICEF, The State of the World's Children; UNICEF/OAU, Investing in Africa's Children. Back.
Note 54: See Green, "Towards Livelihoods, Services and Infrastructure." Back.
Note 55: Ibid; World Bank, Reducing Poverty. Back.
Note 56: See UNICEF/OAU, Investing in Africa's Children. Back.
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