The recent experience of adjustment policies in the Arab world and in the Third World in general clearly demonstrates that it is impossible to achieve a trade surplus large enough to service debt and restore sustainable external and internal balances. The policy of adjustment, with or without...

The IMF has a track record of enforcing aggressive liberalisation in trade and investment alongside contractionary policies, such as austerity measures and regressive taxation, with negative impacts on growth, employment and inequality. However, statements released by the IMF since the 2008...

Arab oil exporting countries have been advised by the IMF to diversify their economies away from oil and that the way to do that is to adopt the ten principles of the Washington Consensus, which call for liberalization, deregulation and privatization. It is not clear how measures like these are...