Biplab Dasgupta Structural Adjustment, Global Trade and the New Political Economy of Development Zed Press, 1998. He's a LSE trained porf of econ at Calcutta University, and sits presently in the Upper House in India. A well argued, empirically rich tract by a reformist politican for the general reader.
Interesting critical discussion of how structural adjustment programs are defended in terms of undermining Mancur Olsonian "distributional coalitions" that impede growth. Mancur Olson's ideas about rent seeking are seen to be the basis of the new political economy. Underlines that organized labor is considered a key member of such growth undermining distributional coalitions
BD also calls attention to the functionality of crisis in implementing key parts of structural adjustment. It would be interesting to explore how the recent financial crisis actually enabled the reform of the Brazilian pension system that had not made it through the parliamentary bodies previously. Didn't finish the WSJ article on this yesterday or the day before.
Still not far in the book , but he wants to defend the thesis that SAPs further the interest of rich countries against poor ones. Notes that while the agencies (IMF/WB) monitoring, controlling and implementing the SAPS are controlled by the rich countries in terms of voting rights, they are the single biggest influence shaping the econ policies of the poor countries. Wants to argue that the adjustment package's basis purpose has been to rescue the international banking system from bankruptcy in the aftermath of second oil crisis and debt crisis and to find markets for the MNCs of US origin in order to rectify its massive balance of trade deficit. The burden of adjusting the US trade deficit has been passed on to the fragile shoulders of the LDCs.
If true, this should raise great worries about how the US will adjust to what seems to be a burgeoning trade deficit.
Discusses the papering of the third world with cash in the 70s, highlights the oil crisis for both the petrodollars it made available for loan and the demand for loans it created among countries hit hard by oil price increases. Notes that the sudden extrication of international finance disastarously coincided with a slump in the world demand for agricultural exports and their prices. Notes that the ensuing net resource transfer to the private banks became negative, causing a great loss of GDP in the 80s
Argues that though structural adjustment was initially meant to apply to the imperialist countries, the burden was shifted to the "not too broad shoulders of the LDC's".
Shows interestingly that rescue operations, e.g, the Brady Plan, were on the basis of the nominal value of the debt, while the growth of secondary market for the external debt papers showed that the real value of the debt was much lower than its nominal value. The private international banks got much more than the lendings were worth at market price because of the support they received from the Bretton Woods Institutions and the Western countries.
best, rakesh