Publication

This paper discusses structural adjustment programs that have fundamentally affected the life chances of hundreds of millions of people in Third World countries from the 1980s onward. The author highlights different approaches to adjustment problems. She then focuses on the macro-social and macro-political effects of the particular form of structural adjustment based upon promotion of radical free-market restructuring, which gained currency in conjunction with the debt crisis of the 1980s. The paper closes with a series of suggestions for rethinking adjustment policy in the 1990s.