Recovery In Countries Research Articles

Sierra Leone: Urban-elite bias, atrocity & debt

Sierra Leone experienced the violent results of an undeclared civil war which lasted over a decade. The state had lost control of the country's hinterland! Maiming, killing, and destruction dominated this part of West Africa, and the violence largely resulted from a set of programmes and policies of the country's post-colonial government which produced pronounced and obscene elite-peasant disparities. With the termination of hostilities, the IMF and the World Bank have financially assisted the country's recovery and rehabilitation through a set of programmes. These were dominated by the IMF's Post-Conflict scheme and the jointly-administered (IMF/WB) Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. This paper interrogates the documents of these International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and queries such data in two senses: a) has the nation's development agenda been able to recover from the debt overhang, and b) are the fundamental causes of the country's violent past addressed? The experience of Sierra Leone provides a window into the operations of the IFIs as they impose neoliberal globalisation in the third world.

Interviews in Kampuchea

In February 1982 I visited Kampuchea for three weeks on the invitation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Like all visitors to Kampuchea whom I have met, I was shattered by the evidence of genocide and of destruction of the economy by the Pol Pot regime between April 1975 and December 1978. But I was equally impressed by the rapidity of the country's recovery under the present government. There appeared to be a sense of hope and purpose among the fifty Kampucheans with whom I had conversations, even though every one of them had lost between fifteen and fifty relatives in the Pol Pot terror.

The Developing Countries Gatt and Unctad

When in 1947 the representatives of twenty-seven nations, including the major trading countries of the world, signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) they paid relatively little attention to the special problems of developing countries. It is true that the ill-fated Havana Charter,' envisaging the establishment of the International Trade Organisation (ITO), had included some important articles on the problems of development; in particular the Charter took account of the special trade difficulties of primary producers. But in the immediate aftermath of war, emphasis was upon the economic recovery of countries of established political and economic status rather than upon the needs of those just emerging as political and economic Powers, few of which had attained full political independence. Although the peoples of what we now know as the developing countries were living in appalling poverty, at the time of the institution of the GATT their economic problems did not obtrude themselves as forcibly upon the world as in recent years. In many countries of Western Europe people were too busy feeding and clothing themselves, and rebuilding their homes and factories, to have much interest in the sufferings of Africans, Asians and Latin Americans-who, in any case, had always been desperately poor. Attention was also diverted from the poverty of these people in that, in the earliest postwar years, many primary producing countries enjoyed a period of (for them) relative prosperity. In some poor countries, notably India and Egypt, the stationing of allied troops, together with substantial receipts from sales of war supplies, had resulted in the accumulation of substantial external balances. Generally the balances of payments of such countries were