“This paper has three objectives: to provide a brief guide to the methodological pitfalls in the way of country-specific research into the distributional effects of economy-wide adjustment packages, which is undertaken in Section 2 of the paper; to survey,in Section 3 and 4, the limited evidence currently available on the effects of past structural adjustment programmes (hereafter SAPs) on poverty and income distribution in Africa; and to offer a summary and some brief guidelines for future research in Section 5. For present purposes, “Africa” here refers to sub-Saharan Africa excluding South Africa, although some multi-country studies
that include countries from outside that region are included.”
