Conditionality has long been used by the IMF, and more recently by World Bank and bilateral donors, as an instrument for improving the effectiveness of international finance. This collection of essays, by representatives of donors and recipients as well as independent observers, suggests that because of recipients' increased bargaining power, such an improvement has seldom resulted.

List of Tables and Figures - Notes on Contributors - Introduction; P.Mosley - PART 1: RATIONALE AND DONOR PERSPECTIVES - Policy-based lending by the World Bank; M.A.Qureshi - Conditionality in Policy-based lending: USAID Experience; D.Gordon - Policy-based lending: An ODA Perspective; P.Sandersley - PART 2: THE POLITICS OF CONDITIONAL LENDING - Interest Group Politics and the Implementation of Adjustment Policies in Sub-Saharan Africa; J.Toye - Consolidating Economic Adjustment: Aspects of the Political Economy of Sustained Reform; J.Nelson - A Theory of Conditionality; P.Mosley - PART 3: RESULTS - Adjustment Programs and Bank Support: Rationale and Main Results; V.Corbo & S.Fischer - The Many Faces of Adjustment; F.Stewart - The Social Dimension of Economic Adjustment Programmes: Economic Feedbacks and Implications for Medium and Long Term Growth; A.Pio - PART 4: CONDITIONALITY INTO THE 1990s - The IMF in Eastern Europe: Lessons of the 1980s and Prospects for the 1990s; A.Henderson - Adjusting Structural Adjustment: Getting Beyond the UNICEF Compromise; J.Cameron - Good Governance: Democracy and Conditional Economic Aid; J.Nelson - Bibliography - Index