Introduction

Abstract

Do World Bank and IMF policies work? The idea of writing or editing a book on this topic first came to mind when I was teaching a course in development economics at Vassar College. Teaching structural adjustment (SA) as the central element of a development economics course is unavoidable, since it represents the most predominant set of economic policies confronting poor countries. Also, it can provide a logical and coherent way of structuring a course since its scope is vast and it provides an entry point to most sectoral issues and to the debate on various schools of thought in development economics, both on a broad level and on a sectoral level. The difficulty I confronted in teaching such a course was finding evidence to report. Much of the evidence was of a cross-country nature, which many scholars found unsatisfactory. Country case studies were available, but they rarely used time series data in a systematic way.