Structural adjustment programmes

Abstract

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.

Notes

This research was conducted in the Department of Economics of the University of the Witwatersrand with the support of Sanlam's Fred du Plessis Award.

Respectively Head of Strategic Research, Sankorp Ltd, and Visiting Professor, University of the Witwatersrand; and Researcher, Department of Economics, University of the Witwatersrand. The authors gratefully acknowledge helpful comments by an anonymous referee, from which the work has benefited. The authors remain responsible for the views expressed.