The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions

by Jason Hickel

We can get a better sense for how devastating structural adjustment was by zooming in on particular regions, countries and cities.22 Take Africa, for instance, which suffered a total of thirty-one structural adjustment programmes during the 1980s and 1990s. In Dar es Salaam, public expenditure per person was cut by 10 per cent per year during the 1980s. In Khartoum, 1.1 million people were added to the ranks of the poor, many of whom had lost their public-sector jobs during spending cuts. A structural adjustment programme imposed in Harare in 1981 raised the cost of living by 45 per cent in a single year; 100,000 people ended up hospitalised due to malnutrition. In CÔte d’Ivoire, the ‘Tiger of West Africa’, poverty doubled in a single year, between 1987 and 1988, as a result of a structural adjustment programme. In Nigeria, the poverty rate rose from 28 per cent in 1980 to an astonishing 66 per cent by 1996. In Algeria, the government was made to privatise 230 firms and fire 130,000 state workers. Poverty rates rose from 15 per cent in 1988 to 23 per cent in 1995.

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