116 SOCIAL SCIENTIST liberalisation, elimination of subsidies, freeing of prices, financial liberalisation and hiking of interest rates, closure or privatisation of public sector enterprises, etc. In the past decade, the World Bank has moved increasingly towards lending for structural adjustment programmes from the project lending it had earlier focussed on, and as a consequence its conditionalities have become virtually inseparable from those of the IMF. The conditions imposed stem from a basic free-market ideology which assumes that unhindered markets are in all cases superior to any form of state intervention except for a few infra-structural and social sectors, and that the withdrawal of the state from economic activity is necessarily positive. This approach is characterised not only by a high degree of dogma, but also by a fundamental ahistoricity which denies the obviou$ facts that the functioning of markets in a particular economy is as historically, socially and politically embedded as the functioning of the government, and neither can be separated from the operation of class forces. The World Bank indulges in periodic reviews of its own activities, and the volume under consideration is the product of one such review of its success in structural adjustment lending. Inadvertently, and reading between the lines, the contributions to this volume provide as stringent a critique of World Bank policies as anything penned by fierce opponents. To that potent this volume is valuable, because votaries of these policies themselves admit of many of the pitfalls and negative repercussions that are likely to occur. It is also frightening, because despite the implicit acceptance of failure in most cases, in terms of worsening economic conditions and material welfare of the people, the World Bank and the IMF continue to push these policies through in developing countries. The latest and most obvious example is India. 'Structural adjustment' and 'restructuring' are current catchwords whose definitions are far from being universally agreed upon. Some use the term to refer to balance of payments adjustment to get rid of chronic deficits, while others speak of making the economy and productive structure more 'flexible' in terms of responding to changes in the international situation. Essentially this seems to refer to the process of laying the basis for sustained growth in the economy, an aim no one can argue with although the means to achieve it can be questioned. In any case, structural adjustment must be distinguished from short-run stabilisation, which refers to a response to shocks, both internal and external, and usually implies some form of demand management. These can both be necessary concerns of economic policy makers— unfortunately, the free market theology has tended to identify both with economic liberalisation, for which there is no theoretical or empirical justification. A related problem in international balance of payments adjustment is that the burden of adjustment is usually thrown completely on the deficit countries: multilateral institutions have neither the will nor the power to enforce any conditions on surplus