Poverty and Development: Prospects and Priorities for the 1990s

The decade of the 1980s marked an unfortunate set-back in the effort to eradicate poverty and hunger in developing countries. Rapid growth throughout the sixties and seventies gave way to stagnation in the eighties as massive structural imbalances were generated out of a combination of underlying economic forces and often misguided economic policies. The interaction of a series of oil shocks, rapid growth in the Third World’s foreign debt, high real interest rates, depressed primary commodity prices, increasingly distorted prices in many developing countries, and grossly unbalanced public budgets combined to distort seriously the functioning of the world economy. The major restructuring of policies and economies that followed in both developed and developing countries further slowed growth, the cost of which was borne most heavily by the Third World’s poor through lower incomes and consumption of food.