78 SOCIAL SCIENTIST (b) avoidance of certain independent economic policy measures such as nationalization of foreign enterprises (especially without compensation), and (c) pursuit of certain ^desirable" economic policies, particularly promotion of private captial and restriction of direct government intervention in the economy. In shorty ^Aid is, in general, available to those countries whose internal political arrangements, foreign policy alignments, treatment of foreign private investment, debt-servicing record, export policies, and so on, are considered desirable, potentially desirable, or at least acceptable, by the countries or institutions providing aid, and which do not appear to threaten their interests."4 The focus of agency policies followed especially by IMF, and also the World Bank, is always on curbing inflation, and the route advocated (and often enforced) is cuts in public investment and important welfare expenditure. Deflationary policies and cutbacks in public sector employment are aften demanded, as is devaluation, ostensibly to improve balance of payment and export performance. The three major agencies have pretty much the same viewpoint in their criteria and conditions for provision of ^aid3 to the non-socialist ^Third World' countries. This is hardly surprising, since they are all dominated by the USA. All of them, in making decisions on aid, concern themselves with the general economic policies of the countries to which they lend, though this is not publicly admitted: ^It is said that in principle, the Bank must now approve both the project and the country before it decides to make a loan. The Bank has not stated clearly and publicly that this is so.'98 An Identity of Interests Hayter's case studies of agency policies are illuminating. We learn that in Colombia, in autumn 1966 IMF and World Bank missions...together with members of the AID permanent mission, met at the U S embassy and decided that devaluation was necessary. The IMF representative went to the Colombian government and said that the IMF would not review its stand-by unless Colombia devalued... The New York commercial banks stopped lending.6 And ^it was the world Bank which ^told* the New York banks to stop lending in Colombia."7 In Chile, the agencies (except for some persons in USAID) expressed themselves against even the limited land reform proposed by the bourgeois reformist Christian Democratic government of EduardoFrci. As Hayter notes, although a more independent government could have forgone aid and defaulted in debts, while nationalizing US assets to the benefit of the Chilean economy, ^it was clear that the United States would have gone, and still would go to... military intervention, perhaps through the intermediary of the Chilean army or of other Latin American Governments" to prevent or topple such a regime.8 How tragically true that is today!