Effects Of Structural Adjustment Policies Research Articles

Knowledge production in European universities

Kwiek’s Knowledge production in European Universities hits the academic bookshelves in the midst of what is regarded as a protracted crisis in higher education worldwide. The upsurge of resistance to never-ending neoliberal “reforms” could be observed on almost all continents in the past decade (perhaps except for African higher education, which has been subjected to the effects of structural adjustment policies since the 1980s) and has not been limited to higher education exclusively. But while studies of higher education institutions have a long-standing disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary tradition in the UK, USA, Australia and some European countries, in the Central and Eastern Europe region (CEE) (widely defined) scholarly occupation with these issues has been critically lacking. The book under review here aims to bridge this latent divide in the scholarship with a comprehensive view of academic enterprise in Europe, while focusing on the processes of establishing the entrepreneurial university in CEE. This extensive book is divided into two main parts. Almost the first two-thirds of the book introduce the readers to the author’s conceptual framework and the political economy of higher education (HE). The second part refers to and discusses the results of Europeanwide research projects on entrepreneurialism at several European universities. In the second part Kwiek relies on a number of international research projects in which he took part in 2004—2013 and it is the results of these projects that provide readers with important insights into the changing nature of private and public HE institutions in CEE. The first four chapters comprising the first part of the book provide us with a dense overview of the complex changes occurring in academic enterprise over the past decades. Kwiek focuses on the indispensability of a new social contract between state, society and HE drawn up after the demise of the real-socialist state in CEE, in particular, and the general introduction of new public management. The new social contract determines the nature of higher education as well—will it be considered a public or a private good? Kwiek points HUMAN AFFAIRS 24, 148–150, 2014 DOI: 10.2478/s13374-014-0213-1

The Devil behind the Mirror: Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic , and : Negociando la aldea global con un pie “aquí” otro “allá”: La diáspora femenina dominicana y la transculturalidad como alternativa descolonizadora (review)

Reviewed by: The Devil behind the Mirror: Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic, and : Negociando la aldea global con un pie “aquí” otro “allá”: La diáspora femenina dominicana y la transculturalidad como alternativa descolonizadora Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof Steven Gregory. 2007. The Devil behind the Mirror: Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic. Berkeley: University California Press. 285 pp. ISBN: 9780520249295. Karin Weyland. 2006. Negociando la aldea global con un pie “aquí” otro “allá”: La diáspora femenina dominicana y la transculturalidad como alternativa descolonizadora. Santo Domingo: Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo. 319 pp. ISBN: 9993425648. Over the last two decades of the twentieth century the politics of international development dramatically remade the relationship between the Dominican Republic and the world economy. This shift began in the midst of the Latin American debt crisis. Under pressure from the IMF and the United States government (both committed fully to neoliberal economic theory) Dominican governments entered into a series of structural adjustment agreements, including drastic cuts in public spending, financial reforms, lower barriers to imports, and eventually privatization of utilities and state industries. With support from Washington, Dominican governments also began a shift away from a heavy focus on agricultural exports towards export processing and tourism. Since the middle of the 1990s, the process of structural adjustment and neoliberal reform has been largely subsumed into a broader boom in international trade, communications, and financial transactions (supported by the same neoliberal politics) known as globalization. As the Dominican state withdrew from spending on education, health care, and price supports, Dominicans turned to the informal sector and international migration in order to survive. Yet Dominicans, even those precariously perched on the informal margins of the new economy, had increasing contact with a flood of goods and images generated by the global boom—a promise of material well being that in no way matched the limited economic opportunities afforded by the new economy. Meanwhile, the political and subsistence crises in neighboring Haiti led to a major flow of migration of Haitians into the Dominican Republic. Haitians had long been part of Dominican society in border and sugar regions. Now they became part of an increasingly multicultural society in cities and in the new tourism and export-processing enclaves. As [End Page 269] Dominican governments sought to maintain legitimacy in an era of austerity, they made Haitians into targets of official xenophobia, racism, and human rights violations. The two books under review seek to document and analyze the social and cultural consequences of neoliberalism and globalization in the Dominican Republic. They share a deeply humane concern for the effects of structural adjustment policies and globalization on local communities and individuals in the Dominican Republic and an interest in the creative responses of those communities to these new circumstances. In Negociando la aldea global, Karin Weyland, a sociologist who has lived and worked in Santo Domingo, offers primarily a work of theoretical synthesis, drawing together ideas about globalization from Octavio Ianni, Saskia Sassen, Néstor García Canclini, and Manuel Castells with the classic accounts of transnationalism by Glick Schiller, Basch, Blanc-Szanton, Portes, and others. Blending this theory with a survey of secondary literature and coverage in Santo Domingo newspapers, Weyland argues that contemporary international migration, which she calls “transnationalism from below,” constitutes a distinctly new practice of border crossing and should be seen as a creative response to the repressive “from above” forms of globalization. Her research subjects are Dominican women migrants who settled in New York City during the 1980s and 1990s. These women, she argues, used family and kinship ties to get visas, to share childcare across national boundaries, to start businesses, and most importantly to move from a context of informal and household labor (or factory labor in export processing zones) to factory labor in New York sweatshops. Though she notes the struggles and injustices migrant women face as workers, women, and racialized minorities in the U.S., she also hears in their accounts a consistent thread of improvement. They have more freedom in their households, better wages, even better status back home as a result of migration. Since these women faced entrenched barriers to social mobility and personal freedom...

A Dialogue on Globalization

he summer of 2000 was hot and humid in Princeton, New Jersey, where I live, but delightfully temperate in Amsterdam, where Diane Wolf was conducting research on post-Holocaust Jewish life. She and I have many interests in common. I have studied women's employment in Mexican maquiladoras, conducted research among Hispanic women in the garment and electronics industries, and investigated the lives of impoverished African Americans in west Baltimore. To understand the relationship between economic change and gender has been one of my top priorities for two decades. Along the way I discovered Diane's exceptional work. Her book, Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics, and Rural Industrialization inJava (1992), is an exemplary case study to which I often return in search of inspiration. Not surprisingly, I thought of her as a preferred interlocutor to discuss the relationships among globalization, feminism, and gender. Below is our exchange, which, true to the age of technological wonder, occurred in cyberspace. Patricia Ferndndez-Kelly: After more than two decades of feminist exhortations and a large supply of literature on the subject, few would deny the importance of gender as an aspect of international development. Gender is apparent everywhere, from the recruitment strategies of corporate managers to the differences in the educational performance of immigrant boys and girls, the unequal distribution of disease throughout the world, and the varying effects of structural adjustment policies in poor countries. Yet the concept has received scant attention in studies of globalization. Economists speak about neoliberalism and free markets as if those phenomena were gender neutral. On a lesser scale, sociologists do the same. That is partly because many studies of women and development are thinly veiled political tracts that owe more to feminist ideology than to disciplined research. They command small credibility. Diane Wolf: You overstate the injurious effects of feminist politics. A more important reason is gender. World system theory, for example, is

Public health debacle in South Asia: a reflection of the crisis in welfarism. South Asian regional meeting on health effects of structural adjustment policies, New Delhi, September 1997.

Over the past decade, reforms of the health sector have evolved as a global phenomenon. The active promotion of these reforms has been associated with an assumed consensus on the need for privatization of public services through mechanisms such as contracting, introducing user charges and the more general application of market principles in the design and delivery of health care among other services. The concerns of participants at the meeting reflect a growing voice from the developing world that global enforcement does not entail a consensus (as portrayed by the advocates of reform) that public services be replaced by private ones. The Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, together with members from the Department of Community Medicine at the University of Cambridge recently held an EC-supported seminar focusing on South Asia but attended also by a small number of participants from Europe, to assess the health effects of structural adjustment policies in the South Asian region. The following is a brief report of the meeting. The three-day meeting, held in New Delhi, was attended by 100 participants. There was representation from non-governmental and independent policy-research institutions from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan, India, Finland and the United Kingdom. Most had been involved in some aspect of health services research. Many, for example, were involved in the delivery of services and included health practitioners, health service managers and health policy makers. The aim of the regional meeting was threefold: (1) to understand the impact of structural adjustment policies upon existing programmes of primary health care; (2) specifically to ascertain the implications of determining priorities in health services as advocated by current prescription to divide services into essential and non-essential ones; (3) to exchange ideas and information on the experiences in the region from a historical perspective, so as to explore alternative models premised upon comprehensive health service coverage as propagated by the Health for all strategy. There was general support for this approach, which was considered still to be relevant

Vulnerable or Poor? A study of Ethnic and Gender Disadvantage Among Afro-Caribbeans in Limón, Costa Rica

Drawing on recent debates on poverty which have stressed the non-economic and dynamic elements of disadvantage, this article explores the concept of vulnerability with reference to Afro-Caribbeans in Costa Rica. The argument focuses on how this group have made impressive inroads in overcoming socio-economic inequalities, yet remain racially disadvantaged in gender-differentiated ways. This relates primarily to labour vulnerability through their occupational entrenchment in ethnic and gender niches. While Afro-Caribbeans, and women in particular, are often employed in relatively privileged segments of the labour market, they are constrained by their lack of occupational mobility. At a broader level, this is compounded by their sense of powerlessness within the national polity. The article suggests that the concept of vulnerability may be useful in other contexts. First, in assessing more intangible elements of disadvantage; second, in examining the evolution of ethnic and gender relations over time, and finally, in contributing to debates on the effects of structural adjustment policies on ethnic groups.

Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America

Several themes dominate this year's column on foreign documents. First, continued privatization in the economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union is an object of great interest, both within the region and outside. Publications from the Czech and Hungarian central banks, and from the Bulgarian Agency for Economic Cooperation and Development provide an internal view of issues related to “economic transition.” The Bank of Italy publication provides a Western view of the process. A central theme for countries in Africa (reflected in documents from the Central African Republic and Liberia) is analysis of the effects of structural adjustment policies on the conditions of life in those countries. Population issues emerged during 1993–1994 as another central theme—the Malagasay national report to the Cairo International Conference on Population and Development is a representative example. A trend in foreign government publishing worth noting is increasing reliance on electronic and networked publishing. This is reflected in the publication of the latest edition of the Estadisticas Historicas de Mexico on both paper and CD-ROM. In addition, several government agencies world-wide are setting up World Wide Web and gopher servers. Argentina's National Institute of Statistics and Census and Singapore's Ministry of Education servers are described below as representative examples. The editor wishes to thank Walter Brem of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, for submitting descriptions for the two Mexican documents that appear in this column.

Is Adjustment with Equitable Economic Growth Possible? Evidence from a Developing Country

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the effects of structural adjustment policies in the 1980s on growth and income distribution in the Sudan within a Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) framework. These policies were unbalanced between the productive sectors of the economy and biased toward modem irrigated agriculture, large capital-intensive and highly import-dependent industries. The SAM multiplier analysis indicates that these sectors have the weakest growth linkages in the economy and the smallest impact on household income. In contrast, traditional agriculture (including livestock and forestry) provide the strongest linkages and have the largest impact on every household income group. These results must be heavily qualified when taking into account the limitations of both the data base and the SAM multiplier model.

Editorial.

This editorial introduces an issue of a journal which contains articles on the themes of 1) macroeconomic policy and gender relations and 2) income generation projects and empowerment. The opening paper dispels the myth that economic policies are gender-neutral. Another article uses the effects of structural adjustment policies in the Caribbean to illustrate how such policies increase women's burdens because of cuts in social services and pressures on women to provide cheap labor to create export goods. A third article depicts the adverse consequences of a macroeconomic policy in India which favors exports over domestic production. This theme is developed in a paper which challenges the notion that export-oriented development strategies provide a "trickle down" benefit to the poor. Specific reversals in development advances in Tanzania are linked to the adjustment experience, and the policy of debt repayment at all costs in the Philippines is shown to have an adverse effect on the poor. Other papers from Albania, India, Tanzania, Chile, and Bangladesh highlight how market-oriented reforms have created conditions which are detrimental to women's health. Further research reveals that the touted "feminization of employment" has actually turned out to be a "feminization of unemployment" as gender discrimination in the labor market continues. Papers on income-generating projects spotlight what has been learned about developing a successful income-generation project which recognizes women's "reproductive labor" time demands. Other articles explore barriers faced by women to access to finance and entrepreneurship. By looking beyond economic jargon and false assumptions, the authors of these papers explore how gender relationships are shaped by economic policies and affect policy outcomes and how women are organizing to improve their lives and the health of their communities.