50 Years Is Enough: The Case against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund / Faith and Credit: The World Bank's Secular Empire / Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development

50 Years Is Enough: The Case against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, edited by Kevin Danaher. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1994. 219 pp. $30.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-89608-496-5. $14.00 paper. ISBN: 0-89608-495-7.

Faith and Credit: The World Bank's Secular Empire, by Susan George and Fabrizio Sabelli. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994.

282 pp. 569.00 cloth. ISBN: 08133-2608-7. $16.95 paper. ISBN: 0-8133-2607-9.

Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environmental Impoverishment, and the Crisis of Development, by Bruce Rich. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994. 376 pp. 529.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-8070-4704-X. $16.00 paper. ISBN: 0-8070-4707-4.

According to a leaked internal World Bank report, four million people were expected to be forced from their lands to make way for various World Bank projects in the South by 1996. The UN economic Commission for Africa found that the countries that followed the World Bank's adjustment formula reduced their expenditure on health and education by 50 percent and 25 percent, respectively. In some of these countries, infant mortality rates have doubled in the past 10 years. Worse, similar trends are evident in other regions of the South where the IMF-World Bank "structural adjustment" programs have been implemented. Mainly because of the inherent inequalities built into these programs, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) reported, the gap between the rich and the poor in the Third World doubled in the 1980s. Now, 1.2 billion people in the South live in absolute poverty, an increase of almost 200 percent in a decade. In much of Latin America, living standards for most people have dramatically declined as income-under the IMF-World Bank lending regime-has been redistributed from the poor to the rich. In Mexico, a "success" story of structural adjustment by the World Bank's own account, real wage rates declined by over 75 percent during the 1980s, and the workers' share of national income declined from 49 percent in 1981 to 29 percent in 1990. Currently, more than 50 percent of the population is unemployed or underemployed. In Chile, another "successful case" of structural adjustment according to the Bank, wages have declined by over 40 percent as the richest 10 percent has enlarged its share of national income by 11 percent since 1970. Over 40 percent of Chileans now live in poverty.