Debt and Structural Adjustment in Africa: Realities and Possibilities

1988 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 11-18
Author(s):  
Thomas M. Callaghy
Keyword(s):  
World Bank ◽  
International Monetary Fund ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
Development Policies ◽  
New Development ◽  
The World ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
External Actors ◽  
The International Monetary Fund

Since the middle of the 1970s Sub-Saharan African states have focused increasingly on their severe economic and fiscal crises. These involve wrestling with the burdens of debt service and the rigors of rescheduling, conducting difficult negotiations with bilateral and private creditors, bargaining over conditionality packages with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank or fending them off, distributing the painful costs of adjustment, coping with import strangulation and devising new development policies and strategies. Already highly dependent on the outside world, the intensity, stakes and levels of conditionality of these relations with external actors have increased substantially.

The changing relationship between the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund

1988 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-560 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard E. Feinberg
Keyword(s):  
World Bank ◽  
International Monetary Fund ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Policy Instruments ◽  
Performance Requirements ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
The International Monetary Fund

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been bedeviled since their common creation over how to define their areas of specialized competence and how to interact in areas of overlapping jurisdiction. The multiple shocks that have destabilized the global economy over the last two decades have stimulated the Bank and Fund to alter fundamentally their programs and approaches, often without fully taking into account their relation to the work of the other Bretton Woods agency.The Fund's traditional focus on short-term stabilization, correcting external account imbalances, and fighting inflation, contrasted with the World Bank's provision of long-term funds for investment in capital-intensive projects. But more recently, with the establishment of the IMF's Extended Fund Facility and the Bank's structural adjustment lending, both institutions share the objective of adjustment with growth, and each claims some responsibility for an extremely wide range of policy instruments. The new Structural Adjustment Facility, in particular, has the potential to link more tightly decision-making on Fund stand-by arrangements and Bank structural adjustment lending, increasing the probability of new forms of cross-conditionality—termed here consultative cross-conditionality, interdependent cross-conditionality, and indirect financial linkage.The Bank and Fund need to find ways to better delineate and manage their new relationship. Problems that should be addressed to do so include proper modes of collaboration between Bank and Fund staff, issue specialization, the avoidance of piling on excessively detailed performance requirements, and decisions on ineligibility. Enhanced cooperation between the Bank and Fund can not only produce more coherent adjustment programs, but can also help to mobilize other sources of official and private capital.

Things Fall Apart Again: Structural Adjustment Programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa

1992 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Barry Riddell
Keyword(s):  
World Bank ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
The World ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Structural Adjustment Programmes ◽  
Financial Issues ◽  
The International Monetary Fund

International economics and global politics are unfamiliar territory for many. However, the operations of institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.) have profound impacts upon the countries with which they treat, and these extend beyond financial issues and geo-politics. This article indicates how the I.M.F. has imposed ‘conditionalities’ in sub-Saharan Africa as integral elements of Structural Adjustment Programmes (S.A.P.s) that affect not only the lives of all the inhabitants, but also the nature and landscapes of the nations concerned — their very geographical composition.

Jubilee 2000

1994 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 699-700 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Peters
Keyword(s):  
World Bank ◽  
International Monetary Fund ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
Grass Roots ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
The World ◽  
The International Monetary Fund ◽  
Intellectual Climate

With five years to go until 2000 is upon us the debt campaign is at present concentrating on two elements important for success. The first is capturing and extending what might be described as grass-roots interest: signs already have appeared of some sympathy with, and even support for, the campaign among economists, bankers, civil servants, diplomats, and politicians; discreet encouragement from the inner courts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank has been recorded. The second is a change in the international, political, and intellectual climate to favour remission.

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