The mixed results of International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programmes in less developed countries are a major motivation for this research. Explanations must be advanced as to what may inhibit the success of such programmes. South Africa has often found itself in a precarious position- with a deteriorating balance of payments, a position similar to other countries that have accepted IMF loans. Furthermore, South Africa undertook an IMF loan in 1993. Financial support from the IMF incorporates structural adjustment programmes. These may include measures such as tighter monetary policy, reduction in the budget deficit, exchange rate devaluation and ceilings on domestic credit with increased interest rates (Ferguson, 1988). These policies illustrate the principle of ‘conditionality,’ whereby access to further loans is conditional on certain criteria being met, such as reduced budget deficits and inflation rates. The principle of conditionality has met with a great deal of criticism. Bacha (1987) and Dell (1982) argue that these aggregate demand-reducing conditions more often than not stagnate domestic economies, worsening the balance of payment and result in programme breakdowns. Essentially, they refer to the IMF conditions as ‘unrealistic.’ The IMF denies this, arguing that shortfalls are mainly due to a lack of political commitment to carry out its conditions (Winters, 1994). This issue of conditionality will be examined in detail, using three specific case studies. The aim of this study is to examine the characteristics of Brazil, Mexico and Zambia to see whether or not the IMF programmes were successful. Guidelines will be established for South African policy from these case studies. South Africa is trying to adjust to the competitiveness of the international economy. At the same time, the need for reconstruction and development exerts increasing pressures on the balance of payments. Guidelines are established for a successful economic adjustment for South Africa. The research concludes that South Africa is certainly in line for a successful transformation. The rigidities are not as extensive as has been the case in Brazil and Zambia. Institutionally, South Africa is sound. However there are still challenges in this area, such as export diversification and economic stability to attract foreign investment.

Ghana’s government implemented the following World Bank programmes: SAP and PRSP. This thesis shows that SAP and PRSP have impacted Ghana in different ways. Sometimes SAP and PRSP worked. Other times both SAP and PRSP had problems and they did not work. SAP created more negative impacts or problems in Ghana than PRSP. The influence of neoliberalism on Ghana’s SAP cannot be ignored. This is because the tenets of neoliberalism include the withdrawal of government subsidies, high productivity, the cutting down of government expenditures or spending and privatization. The withdrawal of government subsidy was seen in the Education and Health sectors of Ghana. In the Education sector under SAP, the government cut down its subsidy to the Ghana Education Service. Then it introduced a programme called “Cost Sharing” in which students and their parents were asked to contribute to the payment of expenditures in providing education in Ghana. Many parents could not afford it, and this led to many school dropouts and a gap in the education of boys and girls. In the health sector, the Ghanaian government cut down its subsidy under SAP. It introduced the “Cash and Carry System,” in which Ghanaians were asked to contribute to the cost of health delivery services. This became a problem for many. Healthcare services became inaccessible for many Ghanaians as well. In the manufacturing sector, under SAP, the rate of productivity fell. Ghana’s products in the world market experienced volatility or fluctuations in prices. In the mining sector the influence of neoliberalism was on privatization. Based on this principle, the government privatized Ghana’s mining sector. It put in place policies that attracted investments into Ghana to do mining. These mining activities contributed significantly to Ghana’s economy. But these mining activities also caused the problem of dislocation of people, loss of farmlands, along with environmental and health problems. SAP had more negative impacts on Ghana. PRSP also impacted Ghana because it attempted to address the problems SAP created in many sectors, including Education, Health, mining, manufacturing sectors. I conclude by saying that although SAP made some contributions to Ghana’s economy especially in the mining sector, it created more problems in the Education, Health, Mining and Manufacturing sectors. PRSP attempted to address them. Thus it cannot be said that both SAP and PRSP impacted Ghana equally in a more positive way. But rather it can said that (1) SAP created more problems in Ghana and PRSP on the other hand attempted to address them.(2)The later developments taking place indicate that the civil society participation in PRSP is having an impact in Ghana.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the impact of International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans since the adoption of the governance mandate on overall government capability. The study will explore whether the presence of IMF loans in developing countries enhances state capacity. Administrative capacity is of particular importance because it is a requisite for the integration of state and society in the national political arena and encourages joint involvement of government and citizenry in overall representation of societal interests. The model designed to test the two primary hypotheses is comprised of a simultaneous system of equations. Despite criticisms of IMF conditionality arrangements, it appears that these programs are largely effective at increasing administrative capacity, an important factor in achieving economic growth and national ownership of IMF development programs.

No description available.

This study had two major purposes: (a) to investigate and compare the perceptions of District Education Officers, principals and teachers about the management of secondary school effectiveness in Zimbabwe and (b) to probe contextualised secondary school management initiatives that could trigger school effectiveness in Zimbabwe. The study is divided into six interlinked chapters. In the first chapter, the problem of intractability in the management of school effectiveness in Zimbabwe's secondary schools is focused upon. The second chapter attempts to highlight the resource, social, economic, political and cultural realities of secondary school life in developing countries (including Zimbabwe) from which any theories of school management and school effectiveness must derive. The third chapter, explores different ways to understand and interpret the realities described in chapter two. To do this, the chapter focuses on ways in which "modern" and traditional" practices intersect in secondary school in Zimbabwe to produce bureaucratic facades. The fourth chapter, which is largely imbedded In the context theory, emerges from chapters one, two and three and focuses on the methodology and methods used in this study. Chapter five, which subsequently matures into a suggested framework for managing secondary school effectiveness in Zimbabwe, contains perceptual data which were obtained from 16 District Education Officers, 262 secondary school principals and 5 secondary school teachers drawn from 8 provinces, 4 provinces and 1 province respectively. Factor analysis of the existing situation In Zimbabwe's secondary schools produced 7 major variables that were perceived to be associated with secondary school management intractability In Zimbabwe: • lack of clear vision about what should constitute secondary school effectiveness; • management strategies that lack both vertical and horizontal congruence; • inappropriate organisational structures; • rhetorical policies and procedures; • inadequate material and non-material resources; • lack of attention to both internal and external environments of secondary schools; and • inadequate principal capacity-building. These perceptual data, subsequently crystallized into the following suggested management initiatives: • establishment of goals and outcomes achievable by the majority of learners; • establishment of clear and contextualised indicators for secondary schooling goals and outcomes; • establishment of democratic and flexible organisational and secondary school management processes; and • replacement of ''ivory tower", rhetoria~l policies and procedures with contextualised ones / Teacher Education / D. Ed. (Education Management)

The dissertation addresses the causes and consequences of the 1973-1974 energy crisis. A new postcolonial concept of sovereignty, "permanent sovereignty over natural resources," challenged the structure of the international economy in the early 1950s. The proponents of permanent sovereignty identified the relationship between the industrial nations and raw material producers as a vestige of empire. By gaining control over national resources, Third World leaders hoped to reset the relationship between the developing and developed nations. The concept of permanent sovereignty authenticated new definitions and goals of decolonization and statehood. A new middle ground between U.S. diplomacy and Third World economic thought emerged in international oil politics. Chapters on the 1967 Arab oil embargo, Saudi and Iranian demands in the wake of imperial Britain's Persian Gulf withdrawal, the legal battles over the Iraqi Ba'ath regime's nationalized oil, and the reverberating effects of newly radical Libyan politics, explain how members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) remade permanent sovereignty between 1967 to 1972. OPEC underscored the salience of permanent sovereignty in the international political economy, but it also undermined it. The built-in tension culminated in the 1973-1974 energy crisis. The final chapters discuss how the impregnable sovereignty preached by OPEC and its transnational backers in the New International Economic Order engendered a strategic response from the United States: neoliberal diplomacy. OPEC's cartel politics became a scapegoat for policymakers who simplified and codified neoclassical economic ideas. Market-centered reform developed into an analytical refuge in the political-economic wreckage of the energy crisis. American strategy toward the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations reveal that neoliberal diplomacy became widely influential in U.S. foreign policy. / text

O objetivo geral deste trabalho é compreender as razões da autonomia burocrática das organizações financeiras internacionais. O objetivo específico é entender porque o Banco Mundial alcançou um grau maior de autonomia do que o Fundo Monetário Internacional a despeito de possuírem estruturas de governança parecidas e terem sido criados no mesmo contexto histórico. Acreditamos que as razões desta diferença residem na burocracia com expertise mais diversificada do Banco Mundial em contraste a burocracia com expertise mais rígida do FMI. Uma burocracia mais diversificada aumenta as possibilidades de formação de coalizões com ONGs em torno de policies de interesse da burocracia. Estas coalizões aumentam os custos de intervenção dos Estados para alterar ou barrar as policies defendidas pelo corpo burocrático. Assim, nossa hipótese é a seguinte: quanto maior a diversidade de expertise da burocracia internacional maior será a possibilidade de formação de coalizões com ONGs em torno de policies de seu interesse e, conseqüentemente, maior será sua autonomia burocrática. Do ponto de vista teórico utilizamos a teoria agente-principal para discutir burocracias internacionais. Do ponto de vista metodológico utilizamos o método comparativo com base em instrumentos qualitativos de análise e estatística descritiva. / The main goal of this dissertation is to understand the building of bureaucratic autonomy among international financial organizations. The specific goal is to understand why the World Bank has reached more bureaucratic autonomy than the International Monetary Fund regardless the fact that both have similar institutional structures. We believe that the reason for such difference is a more diverse expertise of the World Bank compared to the IMF. We claim that a more diverse bureaucracy increases the likelihood of coalition formation with NGOs. Such coalitions aim to support policies that are important for both the bureaucracy and the NGOs. Consequently, they increase the costs for both State intervention and State control over the organization. The higher costs of intervention and control allow bureaucrats to act more freely according to their interests. Hence, our hypothesis is the following: the more diverse the bureaucratic expertise, the more likely is the formation of coalitions between bureaucracy and NGOs, and the greater the costs for State control and intervention. Higher intervention and control costs, in turn, increase bureaucratic autonomy. We use mainly qualitative research methods with some descriptive statistics.

This Master\'s thesis analyzes the relationship between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Brazilian government during the administration of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961). It focuses on the years of 1957-1959, at the time when the Brazilian government was negotiating the country\'s first and second standby agreements with the Fund. The objective is to identify the conditions that led the Kubitschek administration to break down negotiations with the IMF in June 1959. Relying on IMF, Brazilian and North-American official documents, Brazilian newspapers and interviews with Brazilian officials, this study reveals that the Brazilian government only opened negotiations with the Fund in 1958 after Washington\'s intense pressure. The American government conditioned U.S. loans to Brazil to the signature of a standby agreement between Brazil and the Fund, instead of negotiating financial assistance directly with Rio de Janeiro as it had been doing until then. Washington employed the IMF as a way to advance its foreign economic policy agenda in Brazil. This harsh U.S. position remained consistent despite increasing Soviet overtures to Latin America. Given the Fund\'s stabilization demands and Brazil\'s poor stabilization performance, disagreements between the IMF and the Brazilian government built up, leading to the breakdown in the negotiations in June 1959. As a consequence, U.S.-Brazilian relations seriously deteriorated, encouraging President Kubitschek to embrace a more globalist foreign policy. These conclusions are relevant because they brought to light aspects that usually have been neglected by the literature: the crucial role played by the U.S. as to why Kubitschek\'s Brazil sought IMF financial assistance; the insufficiency of a narrow Cold War framework to explain why Washington took a hard stance on Brazil; and the link between the IMF-Brazilian breakdown and the roots of President Jânio Quadros\' Independent Foreign Policy in the early 1960s. / Esta dissertação analisa as relações entre o Fundo Monetário Internacional (FMI) e o Brasil durante a administração de Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961). A análise foca nos anos de 1957 a 1959, momento em que o governo brasileiro estava negociando o primeiro e o segundo acordo standby do país com o FMI. O objetivo é identificar as condições que encorajaram a administração Kubitschek a suspender negociações com o FMI em junho de 1959. Com base em documentos oficiais brasileiros, norte-americanos e do FMI, bem como em jornais brasileiros e em entrevista com oficiais brasileiros, esta pesquisa revela que o governo Brasileiro somente iniciou negociações com o Fundo em 1958 após intensa pressão de Washington. O governo dos Estados Unidos condicionou empréstimos ao Brasil à assinatura de um acordo standby entre Brasil e Fundo, ao invés de negociar ajuda financeira diretamente com o Rio de Janeiro como até então fazia. Washington utilizou o FMI para avançar sua agenda de política econômica externa no Brasil. Essa posição dura dos EUA se manteve consistente mesmo diante das crescentes ofensivas soviéticas na América Latina. Tendo em vista as demandas por estabilização do Fundo e o precário desempenho anti-inflacionário do Brasil, os desacordos entre FMI e o governo Brasileiro aumentaram, culminando na suspensão das negociações em junho de 1959. Consequentemente, as relações entre EUA e Brasil se deterioraram seriamente, encorajando o Presidente Kubitschek a adotar uma política externa mais globalista. Essas conclusões são relevantes porque lançam luz em aspectos normalmente negligenciados pela literatura: no papel crucial dos EUA na busca por ajuda financeira do FMI pelo Brasil de Kubitschek; na insuficiência de uma simples análise baseada no contexto da Guerra Fria para explicar a razão pela qual Washington assumiu uma posição dura em relação ao Brasil; e na relação entre a suspensão das negociações entre Brasil e FMI e as raízes da Política Externa Independente do Presidente Jânio Quadros no início da década de 1960.

No description available.

none