ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the development of that practice and the financial instruments within which it was originally embedded in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. International financial assistance conditional on structural adjustment can seem like an instrument of enforcement to its targets. The emerging global economy now seemed to require not simply voluntary adjustment in the context of gradually deepening interdependence across national economies, but also the external imposition of quite detailed normative standards in return for desperately needed financing. To radical critics from the left, what came to be known as structural conditionality as elaborated by the IMF and the World Bank now cloaked a new form of imperialism. The World Bank had been decidedly Keynesian in its formal and informal policy advice right through the 1960s. Although stable macroeconomic frameworks inside client states were sought, that meant a reasonable equilibrium between internal and external balances.
