Michael Barratt Brown – författare

For thirty years, the World Bank has proposed policies that have produced few economic benefits but have eroded the traditional strengths of African society?even the Bank itself now admits this. But while African leaders, many propped up by the West, are often corrupt or incompetent, an impressive range of regional initiatives and small-scale coope

This book provides an account of actual African experience and African criticisms. It is designed to examine the actual viability of the World Bank''s structural adjustment strategies for Africa, all of which were designed to encourage export-led growth.

This book provides an account of actual African experience and African criticisms. It is designed to examine the actual viability of the World Bank''s structural adjustment strategies for Africa, all of which were designed to encourage export-led growth.

For thirty years, the World Bank has proposed policies that have produced few economic benefits but have eroded the traditional strengths of African society,even the Bank itself now admits this. But while African leaders, many propped up by the West, are often corrupt or incompetent, an impressive range of regional initiatives and small-scale cooperatives, fledgling industrial projects, women's organizations, and peasant associations represent major signs of hope. These countless initiatives, now springing from the grass roots of African life, embody the realities of an African road to development. They speak for good sense and great courage against the failed miseries of today: against World Bank dogmas left over from the Thatcher/Reagan era, against pricing abuses, against uncanceled debts owed to the rich by the world's poorest countries,all of which have led to economic breakdown and war. They also challenge our failure to open up our markets to African exports and our minds to African expertise. Examined here in a manner that is both penetrating and hardheaded, what Africans themselves are saying and doing indicates the basis for a continent's self-transformation and an agenda for the kind of support they are seeking.

The landscape of the world economy is changing rapidly, including new and much more powerful roles for the IMF and World Bank, as well as the rapid growth of wider free trade areas in North America and Europe. Current global trading arrangements, however, involve serious obstacles for exporters from the South as well as rivalries between the major economies. This book explores how the international trading system came into existence, the ways in which commodity markers work today, and why the poor countries of the South are facing not free trade, but unfair trade. It traces the stages of the world's economic development which has resulted in a this stark imbalance between North and South, following the chain of trade from crop to shop.The book's lessons are relevant to students, policy makers, and all those interested in a world trading system built on more than market muscle and the profit motive - a system that serves the interests of ordinary people everywhere.