Tag Archives | structural adjustment programmes (SAPs)

  • Africa Remains at the Center of a 21st Century Cold War

    Plundering Africa–Income deflation and unequal ecological exchange under structural adjustment programmes

    Originally published: ROAPE (Review of African Political Economy) on February 28, 2025 by Dylan Sullivan (more by ROAPE (Review of African Political Economy))  |

    Presenting new research, Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel mount a devastating critique of the impact of structural adjustment in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on recent data on Africa’s material resource use, Sullivan and Hickel show how during this period structural adjustment programmes led to a significant increase in ‘unequal ecological exchange’, a process whereby African countries were compelled to export more materials, energy, and other resources than they received in imports. The difference between the two, Sullivan and Hickel argue, represented a transfer of real tangible materials from Africa to the capitalist world economy, for free.

  • Health care is a human right

    Prioritising profits reversed health progress

    Originally published: JOMO on August 23, 2021 by Anis Chowdhury and Jomo Kwame Sundaram (more by JOMO)  | (Posted Aug 25, 2021)

    Instead of a health system striving to provide universal healthcare, a fragmented, profit-driven market ‘non-system’ has emerged. The 1980s’ neo-liberal counter-revolution against the historic 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration is responsible.