Countries in acute payments difficulties generally seek the support of the International Monetary Fund. IMF credits are granted subject to compliance with economic conditions that have repeatedly given cause for criticism. The two articles that follow, by Jörn Altmann and Joachim Betz, examine...

The classical approach towards adjustment has proved to have considerable shortcomings, particularly in connection with supply response issues and the conditions for re-establishing sustainable growth. The following article concludes that sustainable stabilisation and adjustment require a...

In sub-Saharan Africa, like elsewhere in the Third World, great hopes are attached to industrialization as a means of achieving economic and social development. Are the IMF and the World Bank, via their Structural Adjustment Programmes in the region, helping to create a leaner, more competitive...

While the tax reforms which have been instituted as part of the Structural Adjustment Programmes in ACP countries primarily aim at simplifying tax systems and raising their efficiency, they are also intended to improve distributional equity. This article assesses the equity effects of taxation...

As a result of a donor conference staged by the World Bank in Paris on 3rd and 4th December, 1987, donor countries and international organizations now intend to make $6.4 billion available in the form of a special programme to highly indebted, low-income African countries to carry out structural...

Adjustment programmes promoted by the IMF and the World Bank have met with mixed success in recent years. What part has the interaction of interest groups in the countries concerned played in this connection? What lessons are to be learnt for future adjustment programmes?