The International Debt Crisis in Third World Perspective

• Author: Courtney Blackman
• Pages: 105-116

THE INTERNATIONAL DEBT CRISIS

105

Shortly after my appointment in 1972 as Governor of the Central

Bank of Barbados, I was named an advisor to the Committee of

Twenty for the Reform of the International Monetary Fund. From

1974 until my retirement last year, I attended biannual meetings

of the Interim Committee of the Fund, the successor to the

Committee of Twenty, in various capitals around the world. I had

a box-seat view, so to speak, of the unfolding drama of the

international debt crisis. I can remember vividly the panic among

the finance ministers of the non-oil-producing countries, especially

of the LDCs, at their first meeting of 1974 held in Rome shortly

after the first oil shock.

Naturally, the spectacles through which I watched the drama

had a different tint from those of most viewers from the developed

world. Speaking in my resident state of Florida in April last year,

Mr Michel Camdessus, Managing Director of the IMF, said: ‘The

debt strategy which the international community embarked upon

has achieved much.’ With the economies of sub-Saharan Africa

now popularly described as ‘basket cases’; with the vast majority

of Latin American and Caribbean countries trapped in a syndrome

of contracting output, falling exports, rising unemployment,

collapsing currencies, spiraling inflation and chronic civil unrest,

and with the debt of most LDCs even higher than in 1982, I

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THE INTERNATIONAL DEBT

CRISIS IN THIRD WORLD

PERSPECTIVE