Includes bibliographical references and index.

Testing Hypotheses -- Structural Adjustment, Aid, Debt and Growth -- Devaluation and the Balance of Trade -- Financial Sector Reform -- Comparative Privatization Experience: Employee and Private Ownership -- Structural Adjustment, Industrialization and Export Promotion -- Assessing Impact -- Structural Adjustment, Labour and the Poor -- Gender and Structural Adjustment -- Structural Adjustment and Health -- Trade Liberalization and the Environment -- Structural Adjustment and Food Security.

The term 'structural adjustment' has been associated with rioting, as angry and hungry masses protest food price increases due to subsidy cuts or to other structural adjustment conditions prescribed by the IMF and the World Bank. Structural adjustment, and the neo-liberal paradigm that underlies it, is now the dominant economic paradigm practised by developing countries. The author tests neo-liberal hypotheses before assessing the overall impact of structural adjustment on labour and the poor, as well as its gender, health, environmental and food security impacts. The main purpose of the book is to rely on evidence and to go beyond rhetoric, ideology and anecdotes in assessing structural adjustment in Pakistan and the developing world more generally to examine how reform can be combined with pragmatism and social justice.