Talk:Structural adjustment/Archive 1

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Archive 1

Neutral? No way.

I'm a pretty left of center, and a die hard Keynesian, majoring in economics at UCLA. Even in my opinion this article has an extreme anti-IFI bias. Let me just say this...loaning money to developing nations is probably the worst way to make profit I can ever think of. International aid loans have pathetic rates of return in comparision to virtually every other investment strategy. Yet this article posits that Western nations are simply cashing in on the plight of the poor. The logic amounts to Bill Gates mugging a bum for his pennies. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ethbaal (talk • contribs) 00:16, 12 December 2006 (UTC).

While edits to push what you see as NPOV are always welcome, your comments are arguing against a strawman. No one, the article included, is arguing that the IFI's are getting rich off their SA policies. Donor country transnational corporations are a whole other matter, though.--Carwil 19:22, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

The IMF and World Bank are not the same

This article focuses mainly on activities and effects of IMF Conditionalities. Most of the times that the World Bank is mentioned, not enough context is given to indicate that it is a separate entity. This will only serve to further muddy the general misunderstanding that they are not separate institutions.Javiskefka 11:56, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

This article is in rough shape, very POV. I'll attempt to bring some balance to this over the next little while, it really has a very left-wing slant to it.


  • I did a rough skim of the article and though not terrible, I think it does require a cleanup. However the introduction is fine. If anyone wants to take a quick look at development policy just take a look at John Rapley's book "Understanding Development." The case for SAP really IS difficult to make in many parts of the world, and can be seen as neo-imperialist, imposing a certain method of development along with conditionalities of aid.

Perhaps there is too much criticism in this article, but there is MUCH criticism in regards to SAP that simply cannot be ignored. Almost across the board SAPs have failed to generate much growth, especially in sub-saharan Africa. “…Thirty six percent of the region’s population lived in economies that in 1995 had not regained the per capita income levels first achieved before 1960…Only 35 million of Sub-Saharan Africa’s population of nearly 600 million reside in countries that had higher per capita incomes in 1995 than they had ever achieved before.” (Orjiako xii) - And this is after the failures of UNPAAERD and UNNADAF, after ISI and after the implementation of SAPs. At the same time SAPs have been important to the development in Latin America and Asia. Why this is, I must do more research. But the neo-classical, as well as the socialist/communist development models in Africa need to be re-addressed, this includes SAPs. SAPs work well in certain areas, but the trouble is the linear development theory it takes in addressing almost every issue.

Once again, there is some good in SAPs, but the at this point suggests that SAPs are far from effective in the poorest nations, which require the most immediate attention. This is a fact whether your economic outlook is right wing or left wing. According to Dr. John Rapley, "Even the World Bank now admits that SAPs can stabilize plummeting economies without necessarily putting them back on the road to growth" (Rapley 77, Understanding Development). --130.63.220.171 21:19, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

References and citations

  • There are a number of footnotes in this article, but they refer upwards to a previous citation that doesn't exist. What's going on there? What are the sources used for this article?
  • The section about the "Effects" of the Structural adjustment policies should be reviewed, because there is no clear references sustaining those conclusions, and they are displaying just a point of view. There exist empirical evidence in both sides about the negative/positive effects of the SAP, so it would be great to describe both positions from an academic root. user:poldavo
    • I tried to balance it out some, but I'm not sure if it is good enough. --Catquas 01:18, 14 February 2006 (UTC)
    • OK, I'm pretty sure I got rid of the bias, or at least made it insignificant.--Catquas 17:16, 16 February 2006 (UTC)

This article contains no citations whatsoever. Anyone else see a problem with that?


    • It's true that there are both positive and negative effects of SAPs, but positives are interpreted more as isolated cases. Mexico is lucky to be in the position it is now based on their foreign investment crisis and stock market crash not many years ago. And SAPs have failed as a whole in Africa completely, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development muses this. Page 5, Paragraph 2 and 3 outline specifically the failures of SAPs in Africa in a document titled "Economic Development in Africa - Doubling Aid: Making the "Big Push" Work.
    • This article requires more citations, but I'm afraid I'd get pegged as having a "left-wing" bias, as my research has shown that SAPs have far more negative effects, at least in the case of Africa than good. I also think that criticizing SAPs and being labeled as "left-wing" is a generalization and stereotypical. Albert Hirschmann's alternative theories of growth are not necessarily against capitalism or "the market." Furthermore, the political spectrum has shifted FAR towards the right in the last decade, meaning that what were liberal policies twenty or thirty years ago can be quickly written off as "left-wing" or "socialist." I've rambled enough on this talk page already...Perhaps if someone could inject the positives (and not just theory, positives in practice) of Latin Countries as well as Asia and I'll add some references from the negatives in the case of African nations. --64.231.77.100 02:08, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
    • There is no doubt that there is a correlation between Sub-Saharan African underdevelopment and SAPs. The question is, is there causation? Disease, corruption, and war are also present in many of the same Sub-Saharan African countries that also have SAPs, and someone would need to put forth a very compelling reason why SAPs should be labelled as a/the cause of underdevelopment/negative effects as opposed to any of the other reasons. 204.227.243.16 14:41, 10 April 2007 (UTC)pkmilitia
    • The two aren't always causally related. Some African nations, as Adrien Ratsimbaharison illustrates, are locked into current situations for a number of reasons, including drought and famine that are almost intrinsic to a certain region insofar as a natural disaster which makes an area inhospitable, yet communities still attempt to live there. There are many different causes of African poverty, but I contend that the current model of SAPs do some harm. I also contend that cases where conditions were good (in Africa) also have a negative performance record. I believe SAPs can only be truly effective if infrastructure and moderate industrializations are already present, which much of sub-saharan Africa is sorely lacking. I will add references to my claim in the next couple of weeks. --130.63.233.209 21:47, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Kosovo

Kosovo shouldn't be listed as a receiving country because it is not a country. Receiving entity is better, if you like. Crocodilicus 16:27, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

What about mentioning "briberization" in the Privatization section?

Guardian/BBC reporter Greg Palast mentions that privatization has these problems:

http://www.gregpalast.com/the-globalizer-who-came-in-from-the-cold


" ... Step One is Privatization - which Stiglitz said could more accurately be called, ‘Briberization.’ Rather than object to the sell-offs of state industries, he said national leaders - using the World Bank’s demands to silence local critics - happily flogged their electricity and water companies. “You could see their eyes widen” at the prospect of 10% commissions paid to Swiss bank accounts for simply shaving a few billion off the sale price of national assets.

And the US government knew it, charges Stiglitz, at least in the case of the biggest ‘briberization’ of all, the 1995 Russian sell-off. “The US Treasury view was this was great as we wanted Yeltsin re-elected. We don’t care if it’s a corrupt election. We want the money to go to Yeltzin” via kick-backs for his campaign.

Stiglitz is no conspiracy nutter ranting about Black Helicopters. The man was inside the game, a member of Bill Clinton’s cabinet as Chairman of the President’s council of economic advisors.

Most ill-making for Stiglitz is that the US-backed oligarchs stripped Russia’s industrial assets, with the effect that the corruption scheme cut national output nearly in half causing depression and starvation.

After briberization, Step Two of the IMF/World Bank one-size-fits-all rescue-your-economy plan is ‘Capital Market Liberalization.’ In theory, capital market deregulation allows investment capital to flow in and out. Unfortunately, as in Indonesia and Brazil, the money simply flowed out and out. Stiglitz calls this the “Hot Money” cycle. Cash comes in for speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of trouble. A nation’s reserves can drain in days, hours. And when that happens, to seduce speculators into returning a nation’s own capital funds, the IMF demands these nations raise interest rates to 30%, 50% and 80%. ... " 99.245.173.200 06:04, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Profit from poverty???

--juliactJuliact 07:01, 25 March 2007 (UTC) "In 1997 developing debtor countries paid over $292 billion in debt service from IFIs and received $269 in loans [17]. This resulted in an actual transfer of wealth from the developing nations, or the South, to the North or developed world [18]. The developed world made a profit off of poverty, and insofar has done so every year."

This wrong but I don't know how to correct it.
1st: comparing loan repayments with new loans given within one year is illogical as it is ignoring the initial loan. People don't (shouldn't ;) ) complain that they 'only made a profit' in one year (the first when they received money) of their mortgage and then had *25* years of transferring money to the bank.
2nd:It implies that more loans to the developing world are necessarily better.
3rd: The conclusion that the developed world made a profit does not follow, this refers to amounts of money transfered not profit or loss. They are different. The total return over the lifetime of the loan is what determines the profit/loss not the yearly amounts transferred between two parties.
4th: "...and insofar has done so every year" -this is impossible because to repay a debt initially loans must have been made from developed to developing countries which were vastly larger than any repayment in that year. Again confusing transfer of money with profit.

Could someone who really understands these things clear this up because I don't just want to delete this bit as these kind of misconceptions are common and this is an opportunity to clear this up.


There is a lot of blanket statements here but no citations or evidence to the claims. Support your claims or don't make them. Logically, how can anyone say that SAP's help an economy. How does removing trade barriers help the poor nations economy? How does allowing the selling of their lands to Corporatate interests help them? How does charging for previously free things help the poor? Also, the so-called droughts are not tied to hunger. Check out how much food was exported during the times of these droughts? Why didn't they just use the food to help their own people? Because the SAPs required that they export those crops for U.S. profits. Also, the UCLA economy student's analogy is over-simplistic. Bill Gates mugging a bum for pennies? The SAP policy of increased exports, removed trade barriers, and privatized land all spell big money for the U.S. Not pennies. Former World Bank chief economist and nobel winner, Joseph E. Stiglitz can clearly lay out the failures of the SAPs. If the former cheif economist of these very policies resigned due to the ethics involved, shouldn't this article reflect the criticisms more verbally?


Structural Adjustment Policies must be understood as undermining the necessary predicates for development. Development requires building industry and agriculture and ploughing the profits into improving these. It also requires educating the population to give them the skills to participate in this development. Structural Adjustment Policies are anti-development, in that they demand that education cease for large sections of the population, they demand that improving national development projects cease. What the SAPs demand is a return to the colonial patterns; the purpose of the country is to be a place to extract wanted commodities to be shipped out to the West for as cheap as possible.

Any modern agricultural techniques will be employed on plantations owned by those whose purpose is to extract the goods and ship them abroad and their owners and associates bank their profits in the West without a penny going into national development whatsoever... by the way, when Chairman Mao said that China could not take the "capitalist road", he said it was for this very reason, that taking this road would lead to this type of anti-development system being forced upon China. China was able to build an educated population and develop its industry and agriculture to the point where it seems to be getting away with its return to the capitalist road. East Asia has also benefited in that Communism in China and in North Korea caused the U.S. to insist upon such heretical measures as land reform and promoted tight currency controls and protection of infant industries in the East Asian lands under its influence. The Asian Tigers were the result of that. Now, of course, there is no more Communist challenge and so such reasonable and sensible policy prescriptions are no longer advocated by the United States government.

About the droughts; it is known that both Zimbabwe and Malawi had a grain store with one years' supply in the case of a drought. One of the first IMF demands was that both countries sell off their grain stores. Now these places are considered to be food-insecure. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Procrustes the clown (talk • contribs) 08:20, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Privatization and Trade

This section is extremely poorly writen. Firstly, there should be a section for each of these issues. Secondly, the bit about increased exports favouring the West is quite extraordinary and far from being neutral. There is little evidence for the assertions made and increased exports are generally assumed to be good, since they lead to higher foreign exchange reciepts. The East Asian countries have succesfully increased exports of 'Western-centred' goods and look how poor they are... oh wait, international trade actually helped them. I'm slightly mystified as to why the author thinks that focussing exports on what is profitable is a bad thing.

Sod it, I'm re-writing that section. They might need checking. 163.1.146.4 09:30, 7 June 2007 (UTC)


South Korea used to have the death penalty for currency trading. That was how liberalised that economy was and look what it has achieved. Land reform also was implemented there; in Zimbabwe, they try land reform, and the howls of outrage deafen all. Export-oriented growth was entirely predicated on the successful development of national industry and of the country's human potential. Opening the trade barriers without that development would have meant de-industrialisation, de-agriculturalisation and the sort of horrors SAP-strikken countries have experienced. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Procrustes the clown (talk • contribs) 08:24, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Neutrality discussion

This is what is currently in the article:

Inequality

template:weasel words
Since the implementation of traditional SAPs in the late 1970s the global gap between rich and poor has been steadily increasing [1]. Critics template:who? cite not only SAPs but the fact that they promote neo-liberal ideas, and therefore corporations.
The sole goal of a corporation is to lower costs and maximize profits. As a result, corporations contribute to the availability of goods at a lower cost, and thus arguably an increase in the standard of living. Yet in their cost consciousness, such policies also decrease wages. So while goods and services cost less, people generally earn less. template:Fact|date=June 2008
SAPs have also contributed to the disparities between Developed countries, and Developing countries, or the North and the South. template:Fact|date=June 2008 The IFIs that provide need based loans still receive interest on the payments.
template:POVdate=June 2008

I am not experienced editor yet. I am confused: I see no discussion on the talk page. I would suggest the following rewrite:

The global gap between rich and poor has not diminished since the implementation of traditional SAPs in the late 1970s. Instead, it continues to widen. Organisations such as Friends of the Earth International have criticised SAPs for giving Western corporatations easy access to cheap labour and natural resources, whilst inhibiting the protection of workers and resources.

Kaaskop6666 (talk) 14:14, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Nonexistent Footnotes

The issue of the non-refed footnotes has not yet been resolved. Rangergordon (talk) 09:51, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Mysterious numbers in notes

What on Earth are those numbers referring to? Surely a book but which one? Anyone know? Please put it in if you do. Wikidea 18:29, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

I have no clue either. I thought the numbers referred to the book references below but some of the numbers don't make sense. Maybe there was some valdaism at some point that we missed. --Patrick (talk) 20:03, 28 October 2008 (UTC)
Okay, so here's an example of what is was before only the person who did this system forgot to add a footnotes section. I think the numbers are meant to refer to this list of references:

Wikidea 09:42, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

List of Countries

This article should include a list of countries that have undergone structural adjustment programs. 128.91.4.93 (talk) 14:24, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

  1. ^ 13
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