Suchergebnisse

The structural adjustment program (SAP) that developing countries are obliged to adopt as a condition for debt relief provided by the World Bank & the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has provoked controversy throughout the world. In Africa, in particular, the SAP has been perceived as an imposition with too restrictive a scope. The 1995 World Summit for Social Development, in its Copenhagen Declaration & Program of Action, made concrete proposals designed to reorient SAP into a human-centered strategy for promoting trade & investment, productive employment, poverty eradication, & the enhancement of social integration & democracy. While welcoming these proposals & a paradigm shift currently taking place in the World Bank, it is noted that such movement has occurred before without leading to any significant change. In spite of the high growth rates achieved in some countries for a limited period (usually two years at a time), lackluster per capita gross domestic product growth rates, low diversification, income inequality, & poverty remain the plight of the African people. Even with the IMF Highly Indebted Poor Countries debt initiative, the debt overhang remains a major constraint on economic, political, & social restructuring & transformation. 2 Tables, 1 Photograph. Adapted from the source document.

Uganda is a good example of the challenges facing a poor country attempting to achieve a measure of external and internal balance. The adjustment agenda has been a complex of strategies that have ranged from the revamping of the incentive structure to the reconstitution of the public service. Due to the depth of the earlier crisis and the severity of the continued external disturbances, results from the adjustment effort have been relatively meagre. (DSE)

Social costs of IMF and World Bank programs; findings on the issues of education, health, and food supply.

"Reducing disparities among regions within European countries is the aim of European and
national structural policies. In particular, a European grant contributes to the German
governmental program for equalizing regional unemployment. The goal is to bring it down
to the national average by creating new and/or by safeguarding existing jobs.
In the given paper the distribution of available aid among 271 German labor market
regions is considered as an econometric decision problem. At first, the dependence of the
unemployment rate on the amount of aid is estimated for each eligible region. Using this
dependence, the variance of regional unemployment rates is expressed as a function of the
regional subsidies. The optimal aid distribution among regions is obtained by minimizing
this variance subject to the total budget constraint and administrative restrictions.
The optimal figures computed are compared with statistical data for 2000-2002. They
show that the regional unemployment in West Germany could be equalized better (with
variance 3.50 against the actual 4.40) and with a simultaneous decrease in the average
unemployment in West Germany from 7.45 to 7.28%. In East Germany all regions are
eligible, implying no administrative constraints and a high optimization flexibility. It
enables almost perfectly equalize regional indices down to the variance 0.28 against the
actual 9.76. Under the model assumptions, the actual results of the equalizing policy could be
attained by half the budget granted. These underused possibilities explain the low efficiency of active labor market policies reported in empirical studies. To improve their
performance, some tools for optimally distributing subsidies and predicting their effects
are suggested." (author's abstract)