1994: Volume 25
Volume 25 Number 3 July 1994
Structural adjustment can be dated to the World Bank's 1981 Accelerated Development (Berg) Report, albeit precursor World Bank programmes in Sub-Saharan Africa (e.g. Togo, Malagasy Republic) date to the late 1970s. It is taken by most supporters and critics alike - to be intrinsically neo-liberal in content, but the 1989 World Bank Report Long Term Perspective Study in fact advocates a sharp increase (from about 20 per cent to about 30 per cent of Gross Domestic Product) in government operating expenditure plus human and physical infrastructure. Many observers - again both favourably and unfavourably disposed - see the World Bank and IMF as monolithic in approach and giving top priority to external debt repayment, yet in SSA the Fund's shorter term, more demand management focused approach is often in uneasy balance with the Bank's focus on output enhancement and institutional reconstruction.
Volume 25 Number 2 May 1994
Edited by: Susanna Davies
This Bulletin is concerned with the use and abuse of information in development planning and policy-making. The conventional wisdom that more and better information automatically leads to improved policy an practice is challenged. Issues considered include: the political and economic neutrality of information; whose reality counts, and, who gains from ignorance. It includes articles on use of information in the health and environment sectors, and in food security planning.
1993: Volume 24
Volume 24 Number 4 October 1993
Edited by: Jeremy Swift
Famine is a preventable tragedy. Unlike poverty or chronic food insecurity, famine could probably be eliminated rapidly by a quite simple set of policies. Such policies might be politically feasible. So the abolition of famine is a realistic goal, perhaps by the end of this decade. There are several reasons why this politically uncontroversial goal will probably not be achieved in practice. One is the continuing insufficiency of good theory about the causes of famine, of good empirical and comparative research, and of good experiments, especially in Africa, with anti-famine policies. This IDS Bulletin, is concerned with how these deficiencies could be remedied.
Volume 24 Number 3 July 1993
Edited by: Gordon White
This Bulletin stems from a dissatisfaction with the way in which the idea of 'the market' or 'the free market' is currently used in conventional discourse on development issues. One notion is particularly dominant, implicitly or explicitly: 'the market' seen as a flexible, atomistic realm of impersonal exchange and dispersed competition, characterized by voluntary transactions on an equal basis between autonomous, usually private, entities with material motivations.
Volume 24 Number 2 May 1993
Edited by: John Humphrey
Studies of reorganization among large firms, the focus of this Bulletin, has been stimulated by the increasing dominance of Japanese industry and the attempts to introduce Japanese methods into Europe and North America. Japanese firms have been very successful in manufacturing, and a large part of this success has been attributed to the way large Japanese firms are organized - their management structures, their links with supplier companies and the way they organize production activities on the factory floor. Many Western firms are desperately trying to find out the 'secret' of Japanese success and adopt many elements of Japanese practices themselves. In this literature there is a varying emphasis on interfirm and intra-firm organization.
