ABSTRACT
This section focuses initially on structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), but concludes by locating SAPs within a broad range of economic policies trying, and largely failing, to target women. From the early 1980s, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank granted loans to the majority of states in the ‘South’ for the ‘stabilization’ and ‘adjustment’ of their economies. These loans were to be used to fund policies devised in accordance with the WB/IMF’s dominant economic ideologies, broadly neoliberal, encouraging the shrinking of the state, the removal of subsidies and the growth of competition. Adjusting countries had to agree to implement measures calculated to restore their balances of payments and create entrepreneurially driven economies. There were incentives to produce ‘tradable’ goods (goods that could be traded for hard currency). The medium-term aim of adjustment was ‘recovery with growth’, the idea that Third World states could develop into middle-income countries by 2020.