Making Adjustment Work for the Poor


Book Description

Adjustment is best considered as the implementation of comprehensive reforms of macro and micro policies, in response to various shocks, and to rectify inappropriate past policies that have hampered economic performance. These shocks have adversely affected the whole range of economic policy objectives, including the balance of payments, price stability, full employment, economic growth, the protection of the environment, and equity/poverty reduction. Shocks, whether internal or external, affect all policy objectives, and not simply the balance of payments, price stability, and growth which are the traditional focus. We are here concerned with how adjustment programs have affected the wider social objectives of governments, and especially poverty reduction.













Making Adjustment Work for the Poor


Book Description

This document was written as part of the work undertaken under the Social Dimensions of Adjustment (SDA) Program in Africa. The program aims at thoroughly integrating social dimensions into economic and financial decision-making. To do so, it pursues several parallel tracks. 1) within each country a special institution building effort is being launched to strengthen national capability for policy analysis and project identification, preparation and implementation. 2) country-specific studies dealing with poverty alleviation and economic policy are being undertaken. 3) developing an adequate data base for analysis of social issues and formulating socioeconomic policy through monitoring surveys and integrated household surveys. 4) improving the understanding of the links among conceptual, empirical, and policy issues involved in the integration of social and economic policies and programs. This report deals mostly with the last track. The objective is to provide guidance to researchers and practioners in assembling and anlyzing the necessary data in order to achieve the objectives of the SDA initiative. It then explores the major policy issues that must be faced by governments to integrate social dimensions in the design of their structural adjustment programs and development plans.




Adjustment and Poverty


Book Description

The last decade has bought sharp adjustments and rising poverty to much of the developing world. The experiences of Africa and Latin America are contrasted with areas which were able to combine adjustment with protecting the poor.







Poor Economics


Book Description

The winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics upend the most common assumptions about how economics works in this gripping and disruptive portrait of how poor people actually live. Why do the poor borrow to save? Why do they miss out on free life-saving immunizations, but pay for unnecessary drugs? In Poor Economics, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, two award-winning MIT professors, answer these questions based on years of field research from around the world. Called "marvelous, rewarding" by the Wall Street Journal, the book offers a radical rethinking of the economics of poverty and an intimate view of life on 99 cents a day. Poor Economics shows that creating a world without poverty begins with understanding the daily decisions facing the poor.




Structural Adjustment and the Working Poor in Zimbabwe


Book Description

Presents three studies which examine the relationship between structural adjustment and changes in the social conditions of the working poor in Zimbabwe between 1990 and 1994. Includes a survey of conditions faced by formal sector workers in 18 larger-scale industrial companies in 1993, a survey of the trading patterns, consumption and intra- and interhousehold relationships of 174 urban women traders in 1992 and 1993, and a study of changes in health and health services among 327 urban households and 300 households in a peasant farming area in 1992.




Adjustment, Poverty and Employment in Mexico


Book Description

This title was first published in 2000: Analyzing the poverty trends in Mexico during the 1980s and early 1990s, this work is concerned with the extent to which changes in the levels of poverty have modified the extent of participation in the labour market. The period covered is 1982 to 1994, when the Mexican economy experienced an economic crisis and the government set in motion the main stabilization policies and structural adjustment reforms. The author challenges the idea that adjustment reforms have had "social costs" in terms of income and formal employment loss. Despite income losses, well-being indicators continued to improve; and employment statistics show that employment grew despite the economic crisis and adjustment. The paradox of household income decline and the increase in income poverty is explained.