In the 1980s conditional lending for structural adjustment in developing countries moved the IMF beyond its role of macroeconomic crisis management. Fund-supported adjustment programmes have often been flawed by a lack of distributional analysis and by poor sequencing of reforms, notably...

Using a panel data set for Zimbabwe which includes firm-specific measures of contractual risk, we show that contractual risk has a major effect on the holding input stocks and, to a lesser extent, the constitution of cash reserves. This is consistent with inventories being a hedge against...