(Untitled)

[malefax]

I've been reading "The Fate of Africa", by Martin Meredith -- very interesting history. One of the things that I've gotten from it is the origin of IMF austerity programs. Basically, after African countries gained their independence in the fifties and sixties, they generally instituted presidential one-party systems, which went on to treat the

Comments

[ex_mightygo]

My best guess is that the IMF reforms in South/Latin America and Asia worked (inasmuch as they did - note the socialist reaction to IMF policies currently ongoing in South America) because the citizenry were reasonably educated and had a relative lack of tribalism - both of which greater enable the people of a country to take advantage of the IMF's economic reforms and reduce (to an extent) corruption. Most African countries are extremely tribal and lack sufficient public education, so.

[malefax]

Whether the IMF actions in response to the various currency crises in Asia and Latin America helped or just made things worse still seems to be under debate in the intellectual community. It seems clear that Asia and Latin America were much more able to implement the policies, but opinion is divided on whether the policies failed or succeeded, and if they failed whether they were improperly implemented or just a bad idea in the first place

[kinra]

The Guns of August again and again.

[malefax]

French and German armies discovering that morale is not a match for modern artillery? I'm confused.

[kinra]

Mislearning old lessons, then attempting to apply them to unfamiliar situations. It's what I took to be the gist of Guns of August, and it's the metaphor I tend to use when talking about a situation being approached with techniques from the wrong side of a big conceptual gulf.

[malefax]

Ah, I gotcha. Yeah, exactly.

[zurn]

But coming up with new solutions is haaaard. Getting to actually know the country you're about to mess with is haaaard. You want the IMF guys to, like, work?

OK, maybe they do. Was the feeling at the IMF that the strategies used in Africa could've worked, should've worked, maybe they'll finally work in South America/Asia? Was someone stubbornly trying to prove they're right? Or was it more institutional than that?

[malefax]

I don't know. That's what I'm curious about

[kakitaseigi]

Excellent topic. A real international political discussion! *excited*

Were they appropriate? I think Latin America and Asia are very different sociopolitically from Africa. There's more room for negotiation and regional collaboration, I think, in those regions than there is in Africa, where tribal hatred and genocide are real problems. I take it that the African formula didn't really involve much in the way of regional economic unity, right? However, exactly that could work pretty well in Latin America and Asia (ASEAN, the OAS) and is already being used to solve some economic problems and some other problems as well. I would imagine the formula probably didn't utilize the alliances of the ASEAN and the OAS respectively as much as it could have.

As a sidenote, did the decision to implement the Real in Brazil result out of any of this? I could be incorrect, but the Real program felt very Western in formula and took some hard transition to catch on successfully in Brazil.

[malefax]

From my reading, the various organisations of African states were politically meaningless. Since countries owe debt, not regional associations, and countries run budgets and control fiscal policy, IMF intervention tends to work on a country by country basis. You can't lend money to the OAS