Any comments?

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon Apr 10 07:57:29 PDT 2000


Brad De Long wrote:


>Get rid of the IMF and the World Bank, and "structural adjustment"
>becomes not gentler but harsher, financial crises become not less
>but more frequent, and not shallower but deeper...

What evidence do you have for that? I've read papers from the IMF and BIS claiming that financial crises have been more frequent and more severe in the last 2-3 decades than they were 100 years earlier. First World-Third World income gaps continue to widen, and much of the Southern hemisphere is in chronic depression. Without the IMF and World Bank to seduce and coerce the "developing" countries into the system, they might be freer to pursue more benign policies. What's your counterfactual here, other than intuition?

Doug



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