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ECONOMICS & DEVELOPMENT Thandika Mkandawire and Charles C. Soludo eds. African Voices on Structural Adjustment. Trenton, NJ.: Africa World Press, 2003. viii + 505 pp. Tables. Notes. $29.95. Paper.
African Voices is a compilation of fourteen papers that were part of a study by African scholars, mostly economists, commissioned by the Council for the Development of Social Science Research (CODESRIA) in Africa to appraise the performance of structural adjustment programs and to examine their compatibility with requirements for the continent's long-term development. The first eight chapters deal with the implications of SAPs in general, while the remaining six use case studies to examine how financial reforms have affected various aspects of African economies. Most of the authors acknowledge the need for adjustment programs to deal with the chronic problems of budget deficits, inflation, and exchange-rate misalignment that pervade the continent. However, as articulated in the introductory chapter, they propose reforming SAPs, which they criticize for overemphasizing stabilization fundamentals and ignoring many other fundamentals that deal with development.
The second chapter provides an interesting discussion of the methodological problems associated with evaluating the SAPs' performance, claiming that many of the reports by proponents of the programs are tainted by unfounded attribution of economic recovery to improved macroeconomic policies. The author views the policy framework of SAPs-which address development concerns essentially as "add-ons" (50)-and their performance evaluation criteria as grossly inadequate, proposing instead an "SAP-cum development" paradigm with a composite economic development index as the criterion for evaluation. The following chapter is less critical of SAPs than the rest of the...