By Franklin Cudjoe, Washington, D.C., www.imani.org
The World Bank and the IMF have not had many friends in the developing world since post-Structural Adjustments days, when their advice and interventions, largely backed by aid yielded slow and negative growth. It is the case though, that dealing with the two Bretton Woods institutions is like loaded dice. In one breadth they provide you with advice, and then in another, they continue to support countries that fail, even when their failure did not originate from bad advice, but essentially rooted in disrespect for the most basic institutions needed to effect real change.
Take Ghana, for instance. Not all the IMF and World Bank’s involvement in our mostly self-inflicted tottering economy in the 1980s come to doom and gloom? There were significant gains, which could have been used to diversify our agrarian based economy- yet we watched politicians splurge most of the gains on the 1992, 1996 and 2000 general elections. And just when our strangling debts were paid off, with a promise to ‘taking off’ into the middle income bracket, we watered down the gains again in 2008, with a world record deficit of almost 20% to GDP- mostly incurred as a result of light-speed spending, mainly outside of the budget and ostensibly to chase political votes. Read the rest of this entry »
