John Weeks

Assessing Adjustment in Africa

Abstract In 1994 the World Bank issued a report on structural adjustment, Adjustment in Africa, in which it was argued that orthodox macroeconomic management represented the road to economic recovery for the sub-Saharan countries. This article demonstrates that with its heavy emphasis upon macroeconomic policy, Bank policy shifts from structural adjustment to stabilization. Second, the statistical evidence presented by the Bank is analyzed and shown to be neither convincing nor internally consistent. Finally, an alternative approach to adjustment/stabilization is proposed and subjected to statistical testing.

Has recovery begun? "Africa's adjustment in the 1980s" revisited

This article reviews the 1989 debate between the World Bank and the Economic Commission for Africa over Africas adjustment, and on the basis of most recent statistics concludes that there is little evidence that the region is in throes of a recovery. Some countries, however, did relatively better than others in the 1980s, and an attempt is made to account for differences in performance. It is concluded that success in adjustment results not from World Bank/International Monetary Fund programs as such, but rather from “policy coherence,” accompanied by “healthy” movement in key variables, namely the real exchange rate and public development expenditure.

Poverty Reduction with Growth and Redistribution

In the late 1990s the bilateral and multilateral development agencies placed increasing emphasis on poverty reduction in developing countries. This led to the establishment by the United Nations of the ‘International Development Targets’ for poverty reduction. The target of poverty reduction might be achieved through faster economic growth alone, through redistribution, or through a combination of the two. This article presents an analytical framework to assess the effectiveness of growth and redistribution for poverty reduction. It concludes that redistribution, either of current income or the growth increment of income, is more effective in reducing poverty for a majority of countries than growth alone.

The Expansion of Capital and Uneven Development on a World Scale

This paper explains the divergence among countries in level of development in terms of primary and secondary uneven development, both resulting from the process of accumulation. Primary uneven development arises because of the more dynamic expansion of capitalist countries relatively to countries in which capitalism is incipient. This difference is inherent in the social relations of capital. Secondary uneven development occurs within the group of predominantly capitalist countries, due to competition and adoption of technical innovations within the social relations of capital. The former generates divergence; the latter exhibits a cyclical pattern of convergence and divergence, with convergence the long term tendency.

Ownership and Donorship: Analytical Issues and a Tanzanian Case Study

During the 1990s development funders 1 officially incorporated into their rhetoric the ideal of passing control of the design, implementation, and monitoring of projects and programmes to recipient ‘stakeholders’, 2 a goal summarised in the term ‘national ownership’. Ownership has joined a list of funder-agency concerns that in recent years has included governance, institutions, poverty reduction, sustainable development, participation, and decentralisation. Whether or not economic performance improves with greater ownership, the move to encourage recipient country ownership represents a change in the aid relationship. Numerous and detailed policy conditionalities characterised the Washington Consensus programmes of the 1990s. The rhetoric of ownership appeared to signal a retreat from that approach to the relationship between funding agencies and recipient governments (‘development partnerships’). This article explores the implications of a commitment to recipient ownership. The conditionalities associated with loans and grants are central to the discussion, particularly in the context of the Millennium Development Goals. Most attention has focused on the seven poverty reduction goals. Less has been directed to goal eight, which calls for new partnerships for development. The article discusses these issues in the context of recent developments in aid delivery in Tanzania. The definition of ‘ownership’ is central to an analytical discussion. The meaning varies across donors, lenders and governments, in part reflecting the history of agencies and intergovernmental relations, as well as ideology. 3 For example, the interpretation by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) of ownership, which was profoundly affected by the politics of international aid in Sweden from the 1970s onwards, differs considerably from that of the World Bank. 4 Similarly, the Ethiopian government’s more literal interpretation and the more funder-accommodating approach of the Tanzanian government are influenced by the different histories of these countries. The lack of an agreed definition arises partly because recipient control of development assistance means different things in different concrete circumstances. In addition, vagueness may serve the interest of parties less willing to reform the more obvious manifestations of ‘donorship’ (a funder-driven process). Thus, one must be cautious in attributing too much meaning to the emerging consensus among development funders that ownership is central to aid policy. 5

Performance of Agriculture

In the treatments of the World Bank and the IMF of agriculture in Sierra Leone one finds a tendency to treat price policy as a hammer and every problem a nail. This obsession with relative prices as not only the necessary but also the sufficient condition for improvement in agricultural performance brings to mind the observation of Oscar Wilde that madness lies in carrying an argument to its logical conclusion. From reading the reports of the multilaterals, not only for Sierra Leone but also for countries throughout the Third World, one would assume that a consensus existed among experts on the great potency of the price instrument to promote agricultural development. Even a casual review of the literature showed this not to be the case. For example, Pinstrup-Andersen argued, With respect to the agricultural sector … the importance of price policy has been grossly exaggerated as a tool to achieve rapid increases in total agricultural output and food security in many developing countries. Poor rural infrastructure, lack of appropriate production technology and modern inputs, seasonal labour bottlenecks, and land and marketing constraints result in low supply response in total output. (Pinstrup-Andersen, 1988, p. 101)

Uncertainty, risk, and wealth and income distribution in peasant agriculture

Summary An ethical justification of the market system is that while generating inequality of income distribution it nevertheless provides an equal opportunity for people to improve their material well‐being (1, p. 169). It is argued that the market system creates a society of unequals, but that it is a fluid society in which, though all may not improve absolutely and relatively, the opportunity to do so is randomly distributed through the population. In terms of economic development, this implies that within a free market framework, the distribution of the gains from growth need not be biased towards any economic class. To use a cliche, one of the justifications of a competitive market system is that there is nothing inherent in its operation which makes ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’. The main barriers to economic and social mobility are thus treated as imperfections in the market—racial and ethnic discrimination, differential access to capital markets, traditional constraints on job choic...

Latin America and the 'high performing Asian economies': growth and debt

Prior to the Asian financial crisis, it was accepted wisdom to compare the growth of Latin America unfavourably to that of a selection of East and Southeast Asian countries (the so-called high performing Asian economies). This paper presents statistics that indicate that the differences in performance may have been less than as commonly presented. A modified Harrod-Domar model is applied to the Latin American countries, and the results suggest that a major determinant of slower growth in Latin America was the debt service burden. Copyright

Curses, Diseases and Other Resource Confusions

Abstract Natural resource rents, development assistance and unrequited foreign exchange inflows such as remittances relax the balance of payments constraint on economic growth. The failure of some governments to translate these resources into successful development has been attributed to an affliction called ‘Dutch disease’, or, more ominously, to a ‘curse’ associated with the availability of natural resources. This paper examines the disease/curse analysis and rejects it in favour of a political economy explanation of the problems associated with resource use. We argue that conventional analysis of resource-rich countries is misleading because its various manifestations are based on inappropriate assumptions and flawed logic. In practice the ‘curse’ and the ‘disease’ are outcomes of policy decisions, rather than manifestations of deep structural weaknesses, and they are more likely to be suffered in countries whose governments pursue neoliberal economic policies.

Globalize, Globa-lize, Global Lies, Myths of the World Economy in the 1990s

Major changes occurred in the world economy during the last twenty years of the twentieth century, but there was considerable disagreement as to what those changes were and who gained and who lost from them. In the opinion of the business establishment in the developed countries, the changes created an integrated international economy that benefited all. This sanguine view was summarized in the US Economic Report of the President of 1999: Economies that are open to international trade and investment are more likely to experience a rising standard of living than are economies with significant barriers to cross-border economic activities. Consumers in open economies benefit from a wider variety of goods at lower prices than do consumers in economies that resist competition from foreign suppliers. The economy as a whole benefits from an increased ability to devote its scarce resources to economic activities that it performs relatively efficiently. Over time, through both international trade and international investment, open economies benefit from higher rates of productivity growth and innovation that result from increased participation in international markets. (CEA 1999: 260)