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The magnitude of Africa's debt burden is both a testimony to the failure of past economic policies and a severe impediment to the adoption of alternative approaches to economic development. It is an impediment partly because of the necessity to service past debts, leaving little space for investment in productive activities, and partly because it strengthens the dependency of African states on foreign creditors and aid donors who, by tying assistance to policy conditionality, virtually dictate the policy options open to Africa. Principal among these external agents is, of course, the World Bank which exercises enormous influence through its own loan conditionality, through the leadership role it plays with other creditors and aid agencies and, not least, through its hegemonic role in the dissemination of literature on appropriate development theory and policy. This is the subject of the three books reviewed here, which can be said, therefore, to address the key economic issues facing Africa. Roy Culpeper's The Debt Matrix, when first published, made a very important contribution to our understanding of the nature of the debt problem. It decomposes Third World debt both by types of creditor and by groups of debtors, thereby arriving at a matrix showing which countries are or are not problem debtors. The results are useful reminders that not all Third World countries and, indeed, not all African countries, have debt problems. They also show the severity of debt difficulties by type of creditor. Culpeper builds on these results to derive a matrix of elasticity quotients, displaying what would happen to the debt of various Third World groups if creditors were to reduce their claims by one percent. Based on these results, he then assesses a variety of solutions to the debt crisis and argues
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