Adjustment with a Human Face: A Broader Approach to Adjustment Policy

Abstract

The 1980s will almost certainly be recorded by future development historians as a decade of rising poverty and malnutrition in many if not most countries of the world. Certainly this is true for the vast majority of countries in Africa and Latin America. It is probably true also for many of the better-off countries in the Middle East. Even in the United States, Britain and some of the other industrialised countries, poverty has been rising, and possibly malnutrition among the poorest as well. Only in the economically dynamic Asian countries can one be reasonably sure that malnutrition and poverty are declining rather than increasing, as regards both the proportion of the population affected and the depth of poverty and malnutrition they experience.