to the country's recent history (although the reader is referred to other books, such as Joseph Hanlon's own Mozambique: Who Calls the Shots? [James Currey, 1991] for a full account), and a useful (if very critical) account of the nature of the Bretton Woods Institutions. Hanlon argues that the IMF seeks to reduce inflation by imposing stabilisation to reduce demand, while the World Bank seeks to make markets work by imposing structural adjustment to improve supply. His question is which should come first -reducing supply, or raising demand and restarting the market. In combination the two policies push in different directions. Initially the Bank led in Mozambique, with substantial loans, but latterly, in the 1990s, the IMF's obsession with stabilisation has dominated, and investment (including that from the Bank) has been sacrificed to the goal of inflation control. Both the Bank and the IMF operations in Mozambique are directed from Washington (a list of 27 Bank projects gave a Washington telephone number for 24 of them), and the elected government of Mozambique is severely constrained in what it can do. Meanwhile, the country endures 'a downward spiral in which production is falling and only poverty increases ' (p. 139).The second part of the book examines possible alternative approaches to the fostering of economic growth in Mozambique, including a quick glimpse of Korea and Zimbabwe and a discussion of the potential for rural-led growth. The third section discusses possible ways forward, including the need to do something about Mozambique's debt burdens. Hanlon ends with nine suggestions for action,, starting with the need to force the IMF to change its line and going on to debt cancellation, controlling corruption (of donors as well as government) and supporting indigenous institutions. This is an angry and spicily polemical book. It arises from an initiative of Irish Mozambique Solidarity, and is funded by an Irish NGO, Trocaire. This is not a dispassionate academic account, but strongly engaged with the lived experiences of one of the poorest countries in the world. It has a brisk journalistic style. Facts and data are numerous, as are vignettes about real people. This is not a book about the environment, but it is a book that explains why governments in the Third World might sometimes seem over-concerned about people and less passionate about nature, and it also explains just how much power the international donor community has, and how thin is the intellectual basis for the vast transformations they effect. There is naught here for the comfort of the IMF and the World Bank and their neo-liberalism. This book needs to be read, and argued about.
