The Accelerated Development Report [World Bank 1981] demonstrates quite clearly that the region's economies were in serious trouble by 1979. Excluding Nigeria, GDP per head fell during the l970s by haifa per cent a year in real terms; food production grew much more slowly than population so that food imports increased rapidly; current account deficits increased from $1.5 bn to $8 bn a year despite extremely painful cutbacks in imports; and the cost of servicing foreign debt doubled as a proportion of foreign exchange earnings. Crucially, the Report's puts most of the blame for African countries' economic problems on the policies of their governments, rather than on their economic inheritance from the colonial period, or on the adverse external economic conditions that they have had to face. As Philip Daniel has also noted, three main 'domestic policy inadequacies' are listed in the Report.

These are: trade and exchange rate policies which over-protect industry; over-extended public sectors; prices, taxes and exchange rates which are biased against agriculture and in favour of industry. Although generalisations of the type found in the Report rapidly lose their interest when one begins to study the problems of a particular country, the power and influence of the World Bank, including its new role in making structural adjustment loans, do make it necessary to examine whether the Report is right or wrong in its analysis, at the country level. Malawi makes an interesting case because it seems, at first glance, to have avoided at least some of the policies which are supposed to have been the prime cause of the present crisis. Yet although Malawi's economy grew quite fast in the 1970s, and may not be in such a severe economic crisis as some of the other countries in the region, the economy does nevertheless face serious short and long-term problems.