11
Structural Adjustment
Programmes
'FLEXIBILITY'
It is noteworthy that the same single word appears indiscriminately
in economic policy recommendations - whether these are made to
industrialised countries, to the Third World or to countries of the
former 'socialist' camp. The neo-liberal turn has given rise to a near-
monolithic slate of recipes for all the countries of the world, whether
in the North or South. The watchword is 'flexibility'. In the North,
this has meant dismantling a number of key institutional safeguards
and gutting the social gains that, initially, went hand in hand with
the successes of postwar growth and, later, progressively became a
hindrance to capitalist profitability and accumulation. In the South,
it is state intervention as such that has become the target of the
'letters of intention' that debtor countries negotiate with the IMF,
which demands policies of social austerity (Coutrot and Husson,
1993).
While the IMF has had ties with the countries of the periphery for
a long time, it has focused much more attention on them, and seen
its power there grow, since the outbreak of the debt crisis in the
1980s. As for the World Bank, we have seen how it has played an
ever more important role in the periphery since the end of the 19 60s.
From the beginning of the 1980s onwards, the World Bank and
IMF have teamed up to manage the debt crisis and implement
adjustment policies.
They have at the same stroke become large-scale debt collectors.
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