Do World Bank and IMF Policies Work? (Electronic book text)

The term 'structural adjustment' has been associated with rioting, as angry and hungry masses protest food price increases due to subsidy cuts or to other structural adjustment conditions prescribed by the IMF and the World Bank. Structural adjustment, and the neo-liberal paradigm that underlies it, is now the dominant economic paradigm practised by developing countries. The author tests neo-liberal hypotheses before assessing the overall impact of structural adjustment on labour and the poor, as well as its gender, health, environmental and food security impacts. The main purpose of the book is to rely on evidence and to go beyond rhetoric, ideology and anecdotes in assessing structural adjust-ment in Pakistan and the developing world more generally to examine how reform can be combined with pragmatism and social justice.