Robert Pollin, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, calculates that developing countries lost roughly $480 billion per year in potential GDP during the 1980s and 1990s as a result of structural adjustment. To get a feeling for how much this is, total annual aid disbursements during the same period amounted to less than $100 billion per year. In other words, losses due to structural adjustment outstripped gains from aid by a factor of five. It would be difficult to overestimate the scale of human suffering – and the loss of economic potential – that these numbers represent. Indeed,
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