How Adjustment Programs Can Help The Poor

This study has identified a number of examples in which concerns about the alleviation of poverty have been given some practical expression in adjustment programs. Because most of these examples are of very recent origin, it is difficult to assess how effective they have been in helping the poor. First, one striking feature of the illustrations compiled is that they are invariably orderly or planned structural adjustment programs that have often been implemented with Bank assistance (Bolivia, Cote d'Ivoire, The Gambia, Indonesia, Jamaica, and Thailand). Second, income distributions will inevitably change during adjustment. These changes are the principal incentives for resource reallocation, and without them the objectives of adjustment will not be realized. Third, the study highlights the advantages of interventions that increase the primary income claims of the poor. Finally, adjustment can act as a catalyst for policymakers to examine carefully the costs and benefits of their programs for the poor.

Structural adjustment programmes are the largest single cause of increased poverty, inequality and hunger in developing countries. This book is the most comprehensive, real-life assessment to date of the impacts of the liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation and austerity that constitute structural adjustment. It is the result of a unique five year collaboration among citizens' groups, developing country governments, and the World Bank itself. Its authors, the members of the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review International Network (SAPRIN), reveal the practical consequences for manufacturing, small enterprise, wages and conditions, social services, health, education, food security, poverty and inequality. The stark conclusion emerges: if there is to be any hope for meaningful development, structural adjustment and neoliberal economics must be jettisoned.

Experience has proven that an orderly adjustment process designed to establish a new equilibrium growth path is indispensible for improving the longer-term position of the poor. Some adjustment measures can affect the poor adversely. The most common way of addressing the adverse impact of adjustment has been the implementation of targeted compensatory programs. Such programs can compensate those affected directly by adjustment or provide temporary employment or relief to the chronically poor. Changes in the design of adjustment programs can promote the longer-run interest of the poor, but have received relatively little attention. Appropriate design changes can help to foster pro-poor growth and enable reallocations of public expenditures in ways that support, or improve the efficiency of, programs that help the poor to take advantage of the emerging economic opportunities. Finally, appropriate design changes can target subsidies more effectively. Subsidies that have a large impact on the incomes of the poor, should not be reduced or eliminated unless alternative means of reaching the poor are introduced.

Our Continent, Our Future presents the emerging African perspective on this complex issue. The authors use as background their own extensive experience and a collection of 30 individual studies, 25 of which were from African economists, to summarize this African perspective and articulate a path for the future. They underscore the need to be sensitive to each country's unique history and current condition. They argue for a broader policy agenda and for a much more active role for the state within what is largely a market economy. Finally, they stress that Africa must, and can, compete in an increasingly globalized world and, perhaps most importantly, that Africans must assume the leading role in defining the continent's development agenda.

In this 1998 study the authors isolate the effect of specific policy measures associated with adjustment programs in ten African countries.

This paper presents a study that focuses on specific adjustment programs for limited periods and is aimed largely at analyzing the short-run implications of the policy measures. The longer run implications are also discussed whenever relevant, since much of the rationale for policies and many of the beneficial effects on the poor are likely to be realized over time. The study also notes any compensatory targeting measures oriented to the poor, together with their implications for the adjustment efforts and the political viability of the programs. These analyses may provide lessons for improving the design of future adjustment programs. The chapter also summarizes the sample countries and programs; and describes the methodology used in the study. The results of the study suggest that adjustment programs in general have important distributional implications. During the process of adjustment, it is inevitable that some social groups gain while others lose, particularly when adjustment is aimed at a shift in sectoral resource allocation.