Bank Structural Adjustment Research Articles

Localized Multilateralism: Examining the African Development Bank

Abstract: This paper critically examines post-crisis efforts by focusing on the African Development Bank's (AfDB) role in facilitating recovery and poverty reduction across the African continent. Case studies include the COVID-19 crisis, migration, and efforts to battle regional hunger. The analysis contrasts the approaches of the AfDB's strategies with that of the World Bank's Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), underscoring the former's unique successes and efficiencies in addressing the specific needs of the continent to reduce poverty. The analysis begins by contextualizing the historical and socio-economic landscape, highlighting African countries' distinct challenges with structural adjustment and debt, and then delves into a detailed assessment of the AfDB's initiatives. This paper suggests that the AfDB's customized strategies could be more effective for Africa's development agenda due to their alignment with the continent's varied cultural, political, and economic landscapes. This approach, prioritizing contextual relevance over a sole focus on economic growth, is argued to be more conducive to addressing Africa's unique developmental challenges.

A critical appraisal of the World Bank's structural adjustment programs and poverty reduction strategy papers in Africa

The official aims of the World Bank development programs - SAPs and PRSPs - in Africa and other developing countries are to promote local productivities, advance economic choices, improve living standards, maximise economic competencies, reduce government expenditures, and realise economic development. Based on these promising development policies, many African countries adopted those programs in the early 1980s as a panacea to their worst political and economic problems. Accordingly, this study critically examines the effectiveness of the World Bank's development programs - SAPs and PRSPs - in contemporary Africa. Moreover, the study rationally appraises the multi-dimensional consequences of SAPs and PRSPs in Africa. To this end, the study finds that these programs of the World Bank have brought massive socio-political and economic crises to contemporary Africa. Hence, rethinking the World Bank's development programs should be the prior duty of African states to escape from the existing chaos in almost every sector.

A critical appraisal of the World Bank's structural adjustment programs and poverty reduction strategy papers in Africa

A critical appraisal of the World Bank's structural adjustment programs and poverty reduction strategy papers in Africa

The African Development Bank, Organized Hypocrisy, and Maternal Mortality

We draw on the theory of organized hypocrisy and examine how different forms of lending by the African Development Bank affect maternal mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa. We do so by using a two-way fixed effects model for a sample of 33 Sub-Saharan African nations from 1990 to 2010. We find that the bank's structural adjustment lending in the health sector is associated with increased maternal mortality, and its reproductive health investment lending is associated with decreased maternal mortality, consistent with the organized hypocrisy approach. These findings remain stable and consistent even when controlling for World Bank lending and other relevant control variables. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for global health and development.

David Rieff The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015. xxviii + 402 p. $27.00; $18.96 (pbk).

David Rieff The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice, and Money in the Twenty-First Century New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015. xxviii + 402 p. $27.00; $18.96 (pbk).

The African Development Bank, Structural Adjustment, and Child Mortality: A Cross-National Analysis of Sub-Saharan Africa

We conduct a cross-national analysis to test the hypothesis that African Development Bank (AfDB) structural adjustment adversely impacts child mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa. We use generalized least square random effects regression models and two-step Heckman models that correct for selection bias using data on 35 nations with up to four time points (1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005). We find substantial support for our hypothesis, which indicates that Sub-Saharan African nations that receive an AfDB structural adjustment loan tend to have higher levels of child mortality than Sub-Saharan African nations that do not receive such a loan. This finding remains stable even when controlling for selection bias on whether or not a Sub-Saharan African nation receives an AfDB structural adjustment loan. We conclude by discussing the methodological implications of the article, policy suggestions, and possible directions for future research.

World Bank lending and deforestation: A cross-national analysis

The article presents a cross-national analysis that tests hypotheses drawn from dependency theory that poor nations undergoing World Bank investment and structural adjustment loans tend to have higher rates of deforestation than poor nations not undergoing these types of loans. In doing so, the article analyzes cross-national data for a sample of 61 nations from 1990 to 2005. The study finds substantial support for the dependency theory hypothesis. It also finds that a number of other factors help to explain deforestation. These include non-governmental organizations, democracy, agricultural and forestry-based economic activity, population growth, data quality and tropical climate. The article concludes with a discussion of the findings, methodological implications, policy suggestions and possible directions for future research.

World Bank agricultural policies, poverty and income inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa

The original logic underlying the World Bank's structural adjustment policies in Africa was that the removal of state-created distortions would not only improve efficiency in the operation of markets but also enhance income equality and reduce poverty. The paper explores the linkage between adjustment and the deteriorating income distribution and rising poverty in sub-Saharan Africa with a focus on the rural sector where most of the population earns its livelihoods. The pattern observed is a logical outcome of the strategies embedded in World Bank policies that need to change if we are to counter the persistence of inequality and poverty on the continent. The paper outlines an alternative approach aimed at increasing rural incomes to reduce poverty and inequality.

Trends in Life Expectancy and the Macroeconomy in Malawi

This paper studies the trends in life expectancy in Malawi since independence and offers possible explanations regarding inter-temporal variations. Descriptive analysis reveals that the life expectancy in Malawi has trailed below the Sub Saharan African average. From the 1960s through to the early 1980s life expectancy improved driven mainly by rising incomes and the absence of HIV/AIDS. In the mid 1980s life expectancy declined tremendously and never improved due to the spread of HIV/AIDS, the economic slump that followed the World Bank's Structural Adjustment programmes (SAP) and widespread corruption and poor governance in the era of democracy. At the turn of the new millennium, Malawians were no healthier than their ancestors at the dawn of independence though this improved after 2004. If Malawi is to meet its health Millennium Development Goals by 2015, good governance, improved agricultural performance and an increase in health expenditure should be at the heart of its development policies.

Arrested Development: Multinationals, TRIMs and the Philippines' Automotive Industry

The aim of this paper is to show – through the illustrative experience of the automobile assembly industry and the car parts industry – that the failure of the Philippines to become another newly industrialised country (NIC) in Asia is due to the absence of a clear vision of national industrialisation, aggrauated by a zigzagging programme of industrial protection and deregulation. In the l970s, the Philippines imposed ‘local content’ requirements to participants in a ‘progressive car manufacturing programme (PCMP), to move up from the narrow import-and-assemble pattern of industrial development experience of the l950s-l960s. The vehicle industry at that time was engaged in the assembly of imported completely-knocked-down (CKD) or semi-knocked-down (SKD) parts. However, the programme to deepen the automobile industrial structure was a failure due to the indecisiveness of the government in pursuing the programme, compounded in the l980s-1990s by the haphazard way by which it embraced the IMF-World Bank's structural adjustment programme aimed at promoting an export-oriented industrial (EOI) structure. In 2003, the ‘local content’ requirements were formally withdrawn in compliance with the agreement on Trade-Related Investment Measures (TRIMs) under the World Trade Organization (WTO). By then, both the automobile assembly industry and parts industry were in deep crisis, like the rest of the industrial sector of the Philippines.

Women at Work & Entrepreneurship in Globalization Era

This paper focuses on the impact on women at work and entrepreneurship in India. There was major shift in Indian economic strategy in July .1991. The new strategy was termed as New Economic policy (NEP). It was mainly based on the IMF- World Bank's structural Adjustment Programmer (SAP). The major planks of the WEP were liberalization, Privatization & globalization (LPG) of the Indian Economy In India women entrepreneurship can be considered as necessity entrepreneurship rather than opportunity entrepreneurship with the development of work culture in society for women. The performance of women entrepreneurship in India was quite improving during the period. However, these women workforce may be possessing skills in making handicrafts handlooms items or food production like making chips etc which can be used profitability by creating small enterprises. Therefore, the Government should take an active role in encouraging women to go to work like, to provide day care and also incentives to companies that encourage women's employment.

An arduous climb: from the creeks of the Niger delta to leading obstetrician and university Vice Chancellor

In 1995 I wrote a commentary in the Lancet based on a major lecture at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists by a Nigerian obstetrician. His theme—‘Poverty, deprivation and maternal health’—was exceptionally timely: the World Bank's structural adjustment programme was wreaking havoc on the health and welfare of people in sub-Saharan Africa, with especially vicious consequences for maternal and child health. Describing how countless women, through poverty, ignorance, neglect, and above all illiteracy, received no antenatal care and went on to die with chilling regularity, he quoted a Nigerian saying: ‘If you think education is expensive, try illiteracy.’ Those previously unfamiliar with Professor Kelsey Harrison's work needed little convincing that he was no ordinary member of their profession. His recently published autobiography reveals just how extraordinary his achievements are and why he has argued so passionately that the ability to read and write can turn mountains of maternal ill health into molehills. He was born in Abonemma in the Niger delta, brought up in an extended family that, remarkably, had prized female education since the early 1900s, and trained in medicine in Ibadan and London. Belonging to a minority tribe, he encountered ethnic animosity that threatened his livelihood; he suffered the horrors of the 1967-70 Civil War; and he regularly worked in hospitals that were cramped, pitifully equipped, and understaffed. Yet Professor Harrison retained his determination to forge a successful academic career, one testimony being the hugely impressive Zaria Maternity Survey. Published in 1985 and covering nearly 23 000 consecutive births, this showed the starkly contrasting fates of the relatively few women who were educated and made use of health care services and the overwhelming majority who were uneducated, married off as children, and grossly deprived. Per 100 000 deliveries, maternal mortality rates were 40 in the first group and 2900 in the second, findings that highlighted the need for fundamental social change and convinced Harrison that training of (often illiterate) traditional birth attendants would not save maternal lives. He went on to initiate the Nigerian national task force on vesico-vaginal fistula and co-edit a standard textbook on maternity care in developing countries, and along the way he was honoured with Nigeria's premier award for intellectual attainment. But nothing could have prepared him for his role as Vice Chancellor of the University of Port Harcourt, a position he occupied for three years from 1989. As if tackling financial and academic fraud, rampant theft and embezzlement were not enough, he encountered head-on the destructive effects of warring secret cults that had all but taken over many aspects of student life. Cult members, mostly from affluent backgrounds, were linked to a catalogue of crimes from examination malpractice and destruction of university property to violent assault; they were also behind an attempt to assassinate Harrison. He now enjoys retirement in Finland—including the traditional sauna—but I am curious to know how he satisfies his enduring passion for wielding the willow. If his book doesn't tell us, it does show, beyond doubt, that some encounters during his remarkable life have not been entirely cricket...

The World Bank and the New Institutional Economics

In the course of the 1990s, the policy prescriptions of the World Bank for developing countries have shifted from the neoliberal emphasis on a minimal state, symbolized by the Washington Consensus, to a perspective that emphasizes a much more active and efficient state. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, the World Bank encouraged trade and investment liberalization, domestic market deregulation, fiscal discipline, and a reduction in both the size and the role of the state through the privatization of public enterprises and dramatic reductions in social spending. In the mid-1990s, however, the bank discovered the importance of the state and came to argue that institutions matter for development. As a consequence, it began to advocate the construction of state institutions that would promote economic efficiency and growth. It placed particular emphasis on a series of second-generation reforms that built upon the earlier neoliberal reforms by seeking to strengthen judicial systems, banking regulations, and capital markets, combat government corruption, make bureaucracies more efficient and responsive to client needs, and decentralize administrative, fiscal, and political power from central to subnational levels of government. The bank's central argument for these reforms, according to Burki and Perry (1998: 3), was that macro [economic] policy is not enough; good institutions are critical for macroeconomic stability in today's world of global financial integration. A number of political and economic forces converged to move World Bank policy prescriptions beyond the neoliberal orthodoxies, including massive social protests around the world against the destructive effects of the bank's structural adjustment policies and its own recognition that its policies had failed to reduce poverty significantly and actually contributed to growing inequality.' The focus here, however, is on the theoretical roots of the bank's prescription of a more activist, efficient state, which lie in a body of work commonly referred to as the new institutional economics. Since the late 1990s, a new-institutional-economics perspective has become evident in a wide variety of World Bank publications, including in particular the bank's 1997 and 1999/2000 World Development Reports and many specific studies on

Africa and Globalization: Marginalization and Resistance

This chapter is a contribution to the ongoing debate about Africa and globalization and the interrelated issues of capitalism, marginalization, representation, and political leadership. Problematizing the discourse of Africa as “diseased” and “hapless,” the World Bank's structural adjustment “cure-all” is presented as being much worse than the “disease” that preceded it. Proposing a critical ethics of globalization—which highlights the gap between globalizations's miraculous, self-reflective images and the miserable conditions it creates—there is an attempt to uncover agents of change on the African continent. Social movements such as those fighting for water and electricity in Soweto, for land in Kenya, or against environmental destruction by oil companies in the Niger delta raise questions about the viability of globalization. Often led by women, these movements not only challenge the “male deal” that defines national governments and multinational corporations, but also call for a revaluation of subsistence economies and local democratic polities as alternatives to globalization. In short, this chapter offers important conceptual, as well as practical, challenges to globalization, indeed to the very nature of politics itself.

To privatise or not?: The case of Zambia

As part of World Bank and International Monetary Fund-inspired Structural Adjustment Programmes, many countries in Africa have started or are in the process of reforming their parastatal sector and state-owned enterprises, usually through privatisation. This paper provides a glimpse into Africa's privatisation experience by examining aspects of Zambia's privatisation programme. To appreciate the position of those who call for the privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Africa, it is important to look at where those SOEs have come from, and why they exist in the first place. To descriptionbe Zambia's case, a brief background descriptionption of Zambia's industrial sector is provided, and the country's nationalisation programme is discussed. Much of the paper is devoted to a discussion of the general arguments for and against privatising state owned enterprises, a subject that is high on the Bretton Woods conditionality menu. The second half of the paper is a case study of Zambian experiences.

The Thai Economy in the Mid‑1990s

According to the World Bank, was the world's fastest-growing economy in the decade 1985-94. Real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita increased at an average rate of 8.2 per cent a year. From 1987 to 1990, the GDP recorded real annual growth rates of 9.5, 13.2, 12.2 and 11.6 per cent. Since then, the pace has levelled out to the 8-9 per cent range, but the momentum of growth remains strong. This spurt has transformed the Thai economy. In the early 1980s, could still justifiably be viewed as an agrarian economy, with crops playing the major role in exports. By the mid-1990s, belongs to the club of (newly industrializing economies), with computer and electronic parts topping the list of export products. This article looks at three aspects of this phase of growth and its consequences for the Thai economy in the mid-1990s. Rapid growth has wrought large changes in the structure and dynamics of the Thai economy. The first section traces the major patterns. Secondly, now figures in the debates over Asian industrialization, and the special features of the Thailand case bring new elements to the debate. In brief, the World Bank has argued that second-tier NIEs such as have grown by following the Bank's structural adjustment policies; by courting direct foreign investment; by creating a favourable environment for exporters without intervening direcdy in the capital market; and by refraining from positive industrial policy-making. Several other economists, particularly those associated with UNCTAD (United Nations Commission on Trade and Development), have countered that governments in these countries have in fact played an important and effective role through interventionist industrial policies and active restruc turing of the markets for capital and labour. The second section looks at the recent changes in these two markets in Thailand. Thirdly, the speed and special character of Thailand's growth have given rise to doubts about the country's capacity to sustain the current momentum.

Regional cooperation and Southern African development

This article proposes a strategy of development for southern Africa that is an alternative to the neo‐liberal orthodoxy, one in which regional economic integration is a central feature. The first section reviews the debate over orthodox adjustment and reaches the conclusion that IMF and World Bank stabilisation and structural adjustment programmes have demonstrably failed to achieve their stated outcomes. Then, evidence is presented to support the view that there is considerable potential for agricultural trade among the countries of the region. This is followed by a discussion of development strategy on a regional basis which fosters both export growth and domestic production for import‐replacement.

Structural Adjustment and Performance in Living Standards in Developing Countries

ABSTRACTOver the years, the World Bank's structural adjustment programmes have been criticized on the grounds that they have adverse effects on the living standards of the people in developing countries. The main objective of this article is to test the hypothesis that the adjustment lending countries have had a superior (or inferior) performance to the non‐adjustment lending countries during the 1980s. A new dummy variable regression model is used to test this hypothesis. The model controls for initial conditions, external shocks and other exogenous variables which affect different countries differently. The standard of living is measured by several socioeconomic variables including per capita income, lifeexpectancy at birth, infant mortality rate, and literacy rate.

Structural adjustment programmes

The World Bank's structural adjustment programmes have gained prominence in recent years but have failed to live up to expectations. The literature on these programmes contains empirical evaluation and description of the policy experience in aid‐receiving countries. This article offers an analytical framework for evaluating them. The framework also helps in evaluating the empirical research on the programmes reported in the literature. The programmes failed not because they were market‐orientated or performance‐driven but because of logical inconsistency of their assumptions and conditions in the real world.

Managing Trade: Taiwan and South Korea as Challenges to Economics and Political Science

There is nothing that economists more about than the virtues of free or almost free trade. So says Jagdish Bhagwati, a distinguished trade theorist, who claims that belief in the superiority of the promotion (or near free trade) strategy over the substitution strategy is all but universal among economists, insofar as any kind of consensus can ever be found in our tribe.' Bhagwati's claim is supported by a survey of economists' opinions.2 The survey elicited responses to twenty-seven propositions about the economy from nearly 1,000 economists in five industrialized countries, in terms of agree, agree with provisos, and disagree. Of the twenty-seven propositions, the one that elicited the most agreement was and import controls lower economic welfare. Seventy-nine percent of the American economists and 57 percent of the whole sample generally agreed with it.3 At the level of practical policy, the consensus is expressed in the World Bank's emphasis on trade liberalization. The World Bank's Structural Adjustment Loans over the 1980s have carried more trade liberalization conditions than those in any other policy domain.4 For the World Bank, trade liberalization is the queen of policies, not just one among many. An impressive amount of evidence supports the consensus. Since the late 1960s at least nine major studies have examined the impact of trade regimes on economic growth, income distribution, and other development indicators.5 These studies all resoundingly confirm that free or almost free trade produces the best economic results (with some small exceptions) or that countries with freer, less distorted trade regimes have better development performance than countries with less open, more distorted ones. The implications go well beyond trade policy. Import tariffs and import controls are only a subset of the ways that governments try to alter the composition of economic activity. The neoclassical mainstream believes that most such interventions are a mistake--not just one mistake among many, but a mistake so big as to constitute the main reason for the slow progress of most developing countries. Compared to the effects of government intervention, external factors such as shrinking export markets and volatility in the world economy are distinctly secondary reasons for slow progress, as also are domestic factors like inherent market failures (market failures which are not themselves caused by government intervention). Real world markets, in this view, may well be imperfect, but real world governments are even more imperfect.6 This hypothesis has not been subject to testing in any comprehensive way, but the nine studies of trade policy do constitute the most systematic testing of