Book Reviews 433

having had long contact with SEWA, an NGO which works with self-employed women. It was also the first village in Gujarat to have a women’s dairy marketing cooperative. Necessarily, this raises the question whether services, such as relief works, were typical, or more likely, exceptional.

The focus is household livelihood systems, with dimensions of gender and of seasonal analysis. Part 1 presents The Village, including political and economic change over time, changes in occupations, and patterns of mobility; part 2 is Coping with Seasonality; and part 3 is Coping with Drought. The bibliography is a comprehensive source. The publishers should not have produced a book of this importance without an index.

The book is clear, readable, and useful. It presents a wealth of information about many aspects of village life. These include not only the mandatory ethnography of caste, but also much else such as common property resources (relatively more important for the livelihoods of the poorer than of the less poor), kinship support in distress (declining), diversity of occupations (very marked), the longer hours of work of women (on average 3.5 hours a day more than men), and the range of coping adaptations to seasonal stress and drought.

Some findings were striking or contrary to common expectation. Migration was less in this bad year, compared with more favourable years, because the widespread and prolonged drought reduced employment opportunities elsewhere, and because local relief measures were effective. Drought relief included fodder for animals. Households showed differential vulner- ability by type: labourers were more vulnerable in normal years, but in bad years shepherds and small farmers were more vulnerable. Household vulnerability was also found to correlate positively with degree of dependence on employing wage labour to secure subsistence. Trees were cut and sold to help tide over the drought, and the ex-sarpanch said that he had never seen so many trees cut before.

One can only agree with Dr Chen’s conclusion that ‘both seasonality and drought should be considered key variables in development policy and research’. For too long Indian village studies have been preoccupied with caste to the relative neglect of other aspects of life. Dr Chen’s book is an original and refreshing departure from that tradition. Let us hope that it will inspire others to undertake similar research in other places, and so contribute further to comparative understanding of household livelihood systems, seasonality, coping strategies, and their gender dimensions. Towards such studies, it has made a start which is exemplary in its competence and scope.

ROBERT CHAMBERS Institute of Development Studies,

University of Sussex

Aid and Power: The World Bank and Policy-Based Lending. By PAUL MOSLEY, JANE HARRIGAN and JOHN TOYE. (London, Routledge, 1991,2 volumes: Vol. 1 pp. 317, i12.99; vol. 2, pp. 443, f16.99.)

During the 1970s the term ‘adjustment’ referred to policies that would be followed by the ‘developed’ (OECD) countries, to ease the unemployment and other economic costs associated with granting ‘developing’ countries access to their markets; and ‘adjustment assistance’ meant aid for the affected industries in the OECD countries to facilitate their adaptation to greater import penetration. In that bygone era, adjustment was what the rich countries would do to provide expanded export markets for the poor countries. In a dramatic demonstration of how times change, by the early 1980s adjustment meant what the poor countries did in order to gain access to official and private international capital. In brief, the OECD countries established the international economic environment and the poor countries adjusted to it; and adjusted to it in a manner to the liking of the rich countries.

It is this dramatic shift in the exercise of economic and political power to which Mosley, Harrigan and Toye address themselves. To an extent, the title of the two-volume study is inaccurate, for its subject is less the change in the exercise of power confronting the governments and peoples of the underdeveloped world than the intricacies of the bargaining process within

434 Book Reviews

the more hostile international environment of the 1980s. It might have better been entitled, ‘Aid, Conditionality, and Bargaining’. With regard to this more limited task, the authors provide what, at the moment of publication, represented the definitive work on the stormy interaction between the prime lending organization, the World Bank, and the governments who received that lending.

The study does not treat the theoretical underpinnings of structural adjustment programmes, which are dubious indeed, as many have shown. After an introductory chapter that lays out the authors’ basic framework and perspective, the second chapter considers the process within the World Bank by which emphasis shifted from programme and project loans to policy-based lending. The institutional analysis, quite detailed at points, provides a welcome antidote to the facile official justifications from the Bank itself. Chapter 3 develops the authors’ basic approach to the adjustment process, that conditionality is bargaining, both with regard to the conditions themselves and the extent to which the Bank chose to enforce those conditions in various cases. Chapter 4 pursues the theme of programme conditionality and addresses controversial issues such as the determinants of bargaining power and degree of political intervention by the multilateral. The extent to which conditionality was observed and enforced, an assessment of the impact of programmes, and a review of the earlier arguments occupy chapters 5-7, with an eye to the case studies in volume 2 (Turkey, the Philippines, Thailand, Ghana, Malawi, Kenya, Jamaica, Guyana and Ecuador). For those familiar with the debate over multilateral adjust- ment policies the case studies may prove more valuable than the arguments in volume 1. Particularly interesting are the chapters on a World Bank ‘showcase’ country, Turkey (Kirkpatrick and Onis) and the relative success case of Ecuador (Mosley). To Harrigan fell the task of analysing two cases of adjustment failure (Jamaica and Guyana), and she does so with considerable insight. The case studies would be especially useful as teaching aids in a variety of development-focused courses, since most are thorough and relatively non-technical.

Perhaps the unique contribution of the two volumes is the manner in which the authors seek to assess the impact of adjustment programmes (chapter 6, pp. 188-192). The procedure is to take countries in pairs, with each pair including one with multilateral adjustment experience and one without, and the pairing based upon a judgement about ‘similarness’. While one can take issue with some of the pairings (Honduras and Costa Rica jump off the page as the oddest of couples), the method is a considerable improvement upon the Bank’s own dubious application of the ‘adjusting’ and ‘non-adjusting’ distinction (which in some versions is amended to ‘strong adjusting’ and ‘weak adjusting’, and this makes one wonder why the more obvious ‘well-adjusted’ and ‘maladjusted’ are not used). Using their method, the authors arrive at much the same conclusions of other studies; namely that the impact of adjustment programmes has been vastly exaggerated, and whatever else they may do, they do not produce impressive growth performances. A previous theoretical treatment of adjustment policies would have enabled the authors to point out that their empirical evidence yields just what theory would predict: playing by the neoclassical rules of analysis, adjustment should produce static welfare gains, with ambiguous implications for growth. Overall, the two volumes add to the evidence that adjustment programmes had more in common with snake oil remedies than sound economics.

JOHN WEEKS Centre for Development Studies,

School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

After the Wars. By ANTONY LAKE and contributors. (New Brunswick and Oxford, Transaction Publishers, 1990, pp. 190, $24.95.)

Over the past 20 years, civil war has been one of the most powerful enemies of development. Countries where war has been raging have the worst economic record in the Third World, and the worst human indicators. The costs of war have extended well beyond the immediate military casualties to destruction of economic and social infrastructure and disruption of lines of supply, leading to massive economic dislocation and often famine. According to Lake, civilian deaths amounted to almost ten times military deaths, in the nine countries the book covers.