In the 1980s conditional lending for structural adjustment in developing countries moved the IMF beyond its role of macroeconomic crisis management. Fund-supported adjustment programmes have often been flawed by a lack of distributional analysis and by poor sequencing of reforms, notably...

We suggest that the 'poverty-efficiency' aid allocation is merely a benchmark guide if a donor lacks other information about the country and also the power to change or prevail over government preferences. We argue that in most circumstances donors have only limited scope for the latter and...