"Sierra Leone is a small West African country of apparently little importance to the rest of the world, and economics is viewed by most people as too esoteric or dismal to warrant more than passing interest. Thus, the non-specialist might well ask why he or she should devote the effort to reading this book. The reason lies in the lesson carried by the Sierra Leone experience for other small countries which suffered so tragically from economic decline in the 1970s and 1980s. Racked by the instability of the world market and suffering from population pressure on its resources, Sierra Leone sought aid from the international development community. The aid that came was hardly generous and tied to a flagrantly ideological policy package singularly irrelevant for the country's problems. And when the inappropriate policies produced their predictable and disastrous result, the dispensers of ideology blamed the victim for the failure. That, in brief, was the Sierra Leone story, and its moral has general application."--BOOK JACKET.