ABSTRACT
The New Directions amendments were intended to channel assistance directly to the poor, particularly the rural poor. The demise of New Directions had less to do with either the successes or the failures of its attendant policies, or of any other development in the Third World, than with inflation in the First World. The new buzz-word was privatization. The privatization thrust was multipurpose, but a companion policy was the promotion of austerity— that is, primarily, the rechanneling of Third World government resources away from social programs. The end of the Cold War coincided with an economic downturn in the United States, leading in turn to a change in the political climate. The group contributed up to two-thirds of overall transfers during the Cold War and almost all major transfers since the implosion of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s.
