Explaining History Podcast

Structural Adjustment

Explaining History Podcast

Structural Adjustment

Reading time:

1–2 minutes

Full Description

Economic reform programmes required by the IMF and World Bank as conditions for loans to developing countries, typically including currency devaluation, cuts to public spending (including health and education), trade liberalisation, and privatisation. Structural adjustment programmes were applied across Africa, Latin America, and Asia from the 1980s onwards. Critics argued they prioritised debt repayment to Western creditors over the living standards of the populations being “adjusted.”

Critical Perspective

Structural adjustment is arguably the most consequential — and least debated — form of Western intervention in the Global South. The conditionalities attached to IMF loans removed economic decision-making from democratic national governments and transferred it to unelected international institutions accountable primarily to Western creditor nations. The dismantling of African healthcare systems under structural adjustment in the 1980s and 1990s left those states catastrophically ill-equipped for the HIV/AIDS crisis that followed.

Explaining History

Explaining History Podcast

For more than a decade, the Explaining History Podcast has helped listeners around the world make sense of modern history. What began in 2012 as a simple experiment—short, accessible episodes explaining major historical events—has grown into a long-running library of carefully researched, thoughtful explorations of the 20th and 21st centuries.

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