Review from ROAPE Volume 18 Number 50
Structural Adjustment in Africa (Campbell/Loxley)

This collection of essays aims to throw light on the origins of crisis in Africa, to examine some of the key policy measures being used to try to bring about adjustment, and to offer a preliminary assessment of the record of adjustment up to about 1987. It consists of an introduction by the editors setting out their view of the key issues arising out of IMF and WB sponsored adjustment programmes in Africa; case studies of some aspects of adjustment in Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Madagascar and Morocco; and a case study of the Semry rice project in the Cameroon which it is suggested embodies many of the same problems faced by adjustment programmes. The theoretical perspective of most of the contributors is informed by some version of dependency theory, ‘albeit of a more subtle, sophisticated variety than earlier, discredited, "neo-Smithian" approaches’ .