not impose unreasonable demands on debtor nations. He says that only in Brazil, which self-imposed economic austerity to avoid borrowing from the IMF, has the perception of IMF strictness led to economic problems; this is a point to which we shall return.
There is also, however, a view that IMF conditionality is harming North-South political and economic relations on one hand and either overtly hostile to or not necessarily benefiting economic advancement in countries of the South on the other (Williamson, 1983). On the other hand, as Kahler points out (1990), the international debt crisis of the 1980s adn afterward owes something to other kinds of economic crisis of earlier periods. A general desire on the part of less developed countries of the South is to duplicate to a significant degree the prosperity of the developed countries of the North, but in order to finance the development and growth of their dream, the countries of the South and indeed throughout the Third World took on massive debt obligations. The effect, particularly during the 1980s, was a widening gap between the prosperity of the developed world and the poverty of the Third World, a gap that persists to the current period.
Kahler (1990) sees a connection between the persistent economic crises in the Third World in the modern period and the seeming inability of various regimes in the region to move toward pluralistic political institutionalization. But there was also evidence of inability on teh part of creditors to acknowledge the connection between debt, reform, and the facts of political economy in the Third World. Thus neither economic orthodoxy coming from market-oriented cr
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