The African Crisis and the Ideology of Structural Adjustment

Abstract

During the 1970s and 1980s average incomes declined in sub-Saharan Africa.¹ This two decade decline represented perhaps the longest sustained contraction in per capita living standards for a major region of the world in the twentieth century. Due to lack of information on the plight of the common people of the region, one can only speculate on the human impact of this decline, but consequences must have been appalling. No doubt people will look back in fifty years and be amazed that such a massive catastrophe could have occurred and that intervention to prevent it was so slight. Further, little consensus existed at the beginning of the 1990s that the decline had been reversed.