ABSTRACT
The dramatic increase in poverty levels in the developing countries from the 1980s to the 1990s has been well documented by economists and social scientists (Wheeler, 1984; Stewart, 1995; Huber, 2005). Scholars have also found that much of the increase in poverty in developing countries was due to changes in policies at the IMF and the World Bank (Edwards and Dornbusch, 1994; Edwards, 1995; Haggard et al., 1995;). These new policy directives for developing countries focused on structural adjustment initiatives broadly defined to include privatization, deregulation, and overall measures for these countries to embrace more market-oriented reforms as opposed to relying on governmental programs.
