Education and Development: The Issues and the Evidence

more expansionary macroeconomic policies aim at sustaining levels of output, investment, and human
needs satisfaction over the adjustment period:

sectoral policies aimed at restructuring within the productive sector to strengthen employment and
income-generating activities and raise productivity amongst low-income groups:

the use of mesopolicies on taxation, government expenditure, foreign exchange and credit to influence
the distribution of income and resources: improvements in the equity and efficiency of social sector
expenditure through public expenditure restructuring:

compensatory programs to protect basic health and nutrition of low-income groups;

monitoring of living standards, health and nutrition:

integrating adjustment policies with longer term visions which take into account economic, human,
sociological and ecological contexts.

Though these ideas have begun to appear more frequently in the discussion of adjustment programmes and
attempts have been made in some cases to incorporate them, progress in this direction appears to have
been slow. Stewart (1991 b: 1861) judges that though acknowledgement of the importance of protecting
the poorest groups is evident in recent negotiations there is little evidence that macroeconomic policies of
international financial institutions have been modified with this in mind. What modifications there have
been, have tended to be add-one which are marginal to the main thrust of policy. Reductions in food
subsidies, the introduction of user charges, and price decontrol remain central features of most adjustment
programmes, and these have not been complemented with adequate safeguards for the poorest.

Planning for austerity and under conditions of adjustment is unlikely to be simply the opposite of planning
for growth. There are a range of organisational, procedural, political and psychological reasons why this is
so (Lewin 1987:88). The consequences of austerity and of adjustment programmes designed to restructure
public spending to accommodate new conditions can be broadly classified into seven propositions. These
are:

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