Structural Adjustment in Africa: Ghana and Kenya Compared, 1981-1990

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• Professor Gareth Austin (University of Cambridge)
• Monday 03 March 2025, 17:15-19:00
• Audit Room, King's College, Cambridge: to receive zoom link please subscribe at https://lists.cam.ac.uk/sympa/subscribe/history-global-economic-history at https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/event-series/global-economic-history.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Gareth Austin.

This is the first Global Economic History Seminar meeting of 2025

The “Structural Adjustment” programmes of the 1980s constituted a radical liberalization of economic regime: a shift from administration to markets as the main means by which resources were allocated and goods and services distributed. For the World Bank, Structural Adjustment was intended to be a watershed in economic policy in the countries in which it was introduced, including most of tropical Africa: it meant dismantling the state-led development programs and associated institutions that most countries in the region had adopted after independence and continued to pursue from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s. And a watershed it proved to be, in that the institutional and policy regime introduced by the economic liberalization of the 1980s mostly continues in place to this day. Almost all left-wing and (politically) liberal commentators, within and without Africa, attacked Structural Adjustment from the start as a neocolonial imposition catastrophic for the welfare of Africans. Today it is widely considered almost a truism, by many scholars and other commentators, that the causes and mechanisms of the “SAPs” compromised both the sovereignty of nations which had only relatively recently achieved political independence, and the welfare and cohesion of their societies. Now is an appropriate time to return to this controversy, especially because of the opening of archives on the 1980s, bringing into the public domain previously classified papers in the World Bank and IMF archives, and in the national archives of some African countries. The present paper is a provisional statement from continuing research into the causes and short- and long-term effects of Structural Adjustment. It attempts an in-depth comparison of two countries which, while having much in common, adopted economic liberalization in contrasting economic and political circumstances and with apparently very different outcomes: Kenya and Ghana. The conclusions challenge the consensus on the causes and effects of SAPs, and show that the agency of Africans, from small producers to heads of state, has been underestimated in the literature. This research is part of a collaborative project on transformations in the world economy during the 1980s, led by Professor Shigeru Akita in Osaka.

This talk is part of the Global Economic History Seminar series.

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