The Crumbling Facade of African Debt Negotiations: No Winners

Despite many studies of developing-country debt, most parts of the negotiations remain secret. The author uses confidential interviews and documents to provide a comprehensive behind-the-scenes analysis of Sub-Saharan Africa’s negotiations in the 1980s.
Its original framework for assessing the major types of talks finds that their negotiating procedures made agreements vulnerable to implementation problems, and often to certain failure. In the early 1980s, those powerful enough to change procedure could not see beyond their short-term repayment interests and uncertainty in the international economy. Gradually they acknowledged that existing procedures made exorbitant demands on their staff and undermined their declared objective of “adjustment with growth.” Nobody was winning. They changed them, and the facade of efficiency crumbled. Building on their initiatives, the book suggests challenging but feasible ways of negotiating external finance for Africa’s development in the 1990s.