Over the past decade the non-oil developing countries’ external debt has shown a more than threefold increase, a trend that may be expected to continue in the foreseeable future. In response to the recipient countries’ changing needs, private lending, their principal source of credit, will...

The lending criteria applied by the IMF and the World Bank have been converging for some time. Considering also that since the floating of exchange rates in the early seventies the IMF seems to have lost in importance as a monetary institution, debate is growing on the question of whether the...

Growth in Latin America in the 1980s was much slower than it had been in previous decades and real resource transfer has been negative since 1983. What are the chances that this situation will change in the nineties? Where can the necessary development finance come from? Can bottlenecks be avoided?

Islamic banking, where fixed interest contracts are banned, needs if it is to be successful to operate within a type of financial system in which bank-industry relationships are sufficiently close and pervasive for profit- and loss-sharing arrangements to be acceptable to both sides. However,...

Following the introduction of its structural adjustment loans the World Bank became the object of the criticism that had until then been directed only at the IMF and its stabilisation and adjustment programmes. This article shows that structural adjustment loans do in fact take the traditional...

As a result of dissatisfaction with existing multilateral institutions, the idea of establishing a developing countries' multilateral banking facility-the South Bank-was launched at the Fifth Summit Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement held in Colombo in 1976. Ever since then, the debate over...