The Debt Crisis: Winners & Losers

Worldview ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 27 (10) ◽  
pp. 19-21
Author(s):  
Isebill V. Gruhn
Keyword(s):  
Public Interest ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Third World ◽  
Debt Crisis ◽  
Multilateral Institutions ◽  
Special Drawing ◽  
Industrialized Nations ◽  
Special Drawing Rights

By now the origins of the debt crisis—too much borrowing by Third World countries and too much lending by banks and industrialized nations—are reasonably well understood. What has only just begun is a flood of scholarly articles and muckraking journalism about the collusion between various parties pursuing narrow profits rather than the wider public interest.It is perhaps both natural and understandable that most of these analyses and commentaries are focusing on the complexity of the problem and offering complicated cures. After all, the number and variety of countries in debt is large and growing. Similarly, the number of public, private, bilateral, and multilateral institutions involved in the crisis constitutes a mind-boggling alphabet soup. The jargon too is forbidding. There is financing and refinancing, scheduling and rescheduling, Special Drawing Rights and Structural Adjustment, to mention only what every newspaper reader has to struggle through. And there is the umbrella term conditionality, which, of course, is difficult to understand in the intricate detail of its application, implementation, and implication.

Sri Lanka will try to manage debt without IMF help

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
Foreign Exchange ◽  
Debt Crisis ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Special Drawing ◽  
External Stakeholders ◽  
Capital Outflows ◽  
The Government ◽  
Special Drawing Rights ◽  
India And China

Significance The government nevertheless remains under pressure from domestic critics and external stakeholders because of dwindling foreign exchange (forex) reserves and a growing debt crisis. Sri Lanka approached the IMF in early 2020 for macroeconomic support under the Fund’s Rapid Financing Instrument, but negotiations were shelved. Impacts The government will face increasing domestic pushback over its efforts to curb capital outflows. Although India and China will remain Sri Lanka’s most important partners, ties with Bangladesh will grow markedly. Sri Lanka should be able to access an allocation of IMF special drawing rights later this month.

Neanderthal and the fossilization of the Third World

2020 ◽  
pp. 030631272098346
Author(s):  
Ryan Higgitt1
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Third World ◽  
Caste System ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Investment Bankers ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Face ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Third World

Neanderthal is the quintessential scientific Other. In the late nineteenth century gentlemen-scientists, including business magnates, investment bankers and lawmakers with interest in questions of human and human societal development, framed Europe’s Neanderthal and South Asia’s indigenous Negritos as close evolutionary kin. Simultaneously, they explained Neanderthal’s extinction as the consequence of an inherent backwardness in the face of fair-skinned, steadily-progressing newcomers to ancient Europe who behaved in ways associated with capitalism. This racialization and economization of Neanderthal helped bring meaning and actual legal reality to Negritos via the British Raj’s official ‘schedules of backward castes and tribes’. It also helped justify the Raj’s initiation of market-oriented reforms in order to break a developmental equilibrium deemed created when fair-skinned newcomers to ancient South Asia enslaved Negritos in an enduring caste system. Neanderthal was integral to the scientism behind the British construction of caste, and contributed to India’s becoming a principal ‘Third World’ target of Western structural adjustment policies as continuation of South Asia’s ‘evolution assistance’.

scholarly journals Cleaning up Third World Debt Without Getting Taken to the Cleaners

1990 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Bulow ◽  
Kenneth Rogoff
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Debt Crisis ◽  
Population Control ◽  
Development Aid ◽  
Bank Debt ◽  
International Debt ◽  
Regulatory Changes ◽  
Loan Guarantees ◽  
Third World Debt ◽  
Made In

Should taxpayers of wealthy countries finance a leveraged buyout of third world debt? The case for establishing an international debt discount facility rests on the belief that the overhang of foreign commercial bank debt is stifling growth in the Highly Indebted Countries, and that coordination problems among private sector banks are blocking efficiency-enhancing debt reduction schemes. Thus there is scope for a multilateral government agency to step in, buy up the debts, and pass on the efficiency gains to struggling debtors. Our contention is that a debt discount facility would in fact be a black hole for aid funds, and would yield only minimal efficiency benefits. Our assessment of the debt crisis suggests a very different approach. Development aid should be divorced from debt negotiations and instead should be tied to countries' performance in areas such as environmental policy, drug interdiction, and population control. Future aid allocations should not be disguised as loan guarantees, and the massive bond obligations of existing multilateral lenders ought to be placed on the books. Finally, we recommend reversing a number of legal and regulatory changes made in the 1970s that served to encourage the loans in the first place.

Publishing and the Intellectual System

1975 ◽  
Vol 421 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip G. Altbach
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Third World ◽  
Book Industry ◽  
Intellectual Community ◽  
The Third ◽  
System A ◽  
Intellectual System ◽  
Industrialized Nations ◽  
The Third World ◽  
Relationship Of

Publishing is an integral part of the total intellectual system of any nation and of an international relationship of cultural and educational matters. Publishers are very much influenced by currents in their societies. Such factors as levels of literacy, habits of book purchasing, libraries, copyright regulations and bookstores have an impact on the nature of publishing and the book industry. The educational system, a particularly important consumer of books, is crucial to publishing. In industrialized nations, where levels of literacy are high, it is likely that publishing will be highly developed although it is under increasing attack from such forces as television and other mass media. In the Third World, the mass media are not highly developed, and books often have a particularly important role. This article argues that it is impossible to ignore the broader elements of the modern intellectual community in discussing publishing, and that books continue to play a key role in the development of that community and of the culture in general.

scholarly journals Disease in a Debt Crisis: Financing Global Health, Development and AIDS between WHO and World Bank, 1978–87

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 303-324
Author(s):  
Reiko Kanazawa
Keyword(s):  
World Bank ◽  
Structural Adjustment ◽  
Resource Constraints ◽  
Debt Crisis ◽  
Health Sector ◽  
Early Years ◽  
World Health ◽  
Joint Research ◽  
Health And Development ◽  
Health Organization

This article examines how international organisations with mandates in health and development interpret global economic crises and respond to disease. It contributes the perspective of World Bank to emerging scholarship on the various factors leading to the decline of the World Health Organization (WHO) and its Health for All (HFA) mission during structural adjustment. It does so by telling a story of collaboration and conflict between WHO and World Bank’s Population, Health and Nutrition (PHN) Department following the ambitious Alma Ata Declaration in 1978 until the initial global AIDS response. As debt crises emerged in Latin America in the early 1980s, WHO tried to find a way forward for HFA. However, the African crisis of 1985 fractured the international community’s support, causing WHO and PHN to dialogue more closely regarding health sector financing. As AIDS became a global crisis, this culminated in their 1987 joint research on the disease’s macroeconomic and demographic impact. However, observing WHO’s continued hesitance regarding financing and its decision to act as a donor gatekeeper, the Bank ultimately opted to work separately in AIDS. Thus, the themes of the Alma Ata versus Selective Primary Health Care debate of the late 1970s continued throughout the 1980s into the early years of the global AIDS response: a perennial conflict of financing within resource constraints and the appropriate role of donors in the grand project of health and development.

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