This article assesses the impact of economic structural programs on the agricultural activities of women's groups in Cameroon, and explores women's ways of coping with the reduction in individual and family income and the loss of public services. It examines the role of 25 women's groups in both rural and urban areas of Cameroon's northwest and southwest provinces in a study conducted from Apr...

This paper assesses various capital and labor adjustment costs functions estimating a general equilibrium framework with Bayesian methods using US aggregate data. The estimation finds that the adjustment costs are convex in both capital and labor and allowing for their joint interaction is important. The structural model enables us to identify the response of factor adjustment costs to exogenou...

In the 1980s conditional lending for structural adjustment in developing countries moved the IMF beyond its role of macroeconomic crisis management. Fund-supported adjustment programmes have often been flawed by a lack of distributional analysis and by poor sequencing of reforms, notably premature financial liberalisation. As a result they have caused avoidable hardship. In addition, the attemp...

Hungary has gone through a radical structural change after the fall of the socialist block in Central-Eastern Europe. Two basic processes dominated the transition: privatization and decentralization. The Hungarian experiences have given evidence that political decentralization of the state sector can have a substantial contribution to an efficient economic adjustment in the transitional recessi...

The lack of proper enforcement mechanism for sovereign debt generates a commitment failure. As a result, a sovereign may seek to improve its position in debt renegotiations and thus evade its debt obligations by reducing exports. Conditionality seeks to provide a solution to the incentive problem by addressing the commitment failure. Formalizing this argument, we show that conditionality helps ...

The medical and social consequences and the wide effects of the African structural adjustment program (SAP), specifically for women and children, and examples of the impact in Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Senegal, are discussed. Structural adjustment is defined and the history of its inception is provided. Significant economic and social welfare improvement occurred during the 1960s and 1970s, and c...

o It is found that the SAP design and framework does not adequately address gender issues, which is again due to the focus of SAP on efficiency, growth and stabilization, without considering structural constraints, and without considering inequality, including that between men and women. Gender concerns were incorporated much later along with issues such as institutions, governance and the envi...