Quote Originally Posted by tequila View Post
Dayuhan - have you ever read The Economist's Tale? I'd think you'd get a heck of a kick out of it. About a World Bank consultant on the ground in Sierra Leone in the 1980s and his struggle to get the WB to reverse policy on rice subsidies. An outstanding real-world example of dysfunctional aid at work.

The entire book is excellent, but the best passages are about the difficulty of getting good real-world data on how Third World economies actually function, and how bad data (which abounds) can lead to decisions with appalling effects.
I agree, Tequila--it is a great book.. I set it as a reading in my intro development course when it came out.

Dayuhan: While I don't want to get too bogged down in semantics, I think the term neoliberal has had more traction--for good and for ill--than you suggest. It is a staple phrase of much the NGO community (that is to say, the folks who in many sectors actually deliver the bulk of ODA), and one of the chief critic of past "neoliberalism" has been former World Bank chief economist/senior VP Joseph Stiglitz--hardly just a marginal leftist academic. Of course, Stiglitz won his Nobel Prize in economics for highlighting the potential shortcomings and limits of market mechanisms, so that's not a surprise