He also brings to light the Bank's complicity in the brutal collectivization policies of Vietnam in the late 1970 s. Doug Bandow demonstrates how the IMF relieves the political pressure on Third World governments for a much needed reform of their economic policies. Surely Western taxpayers would be outraged if they knew that their money was going not to help the poor but to finance international socialism. The Third World is not poor because it lacks capital, it is poor because it lacks economic freedom. These things are not caused by poverty, they are the cause of poverty.
Foreign aid is inherently statist.
It is analogous to lecturing a drug addict on the need for reform while giving him money to buy more drugs. Perpetuating Poverty shows that what the Third World needs is not more dollars but the moral and political reform which underlie a free economy. The poor nations also need increased trade with the West. As the last section of the book details, it is a striking hypocrisy that while Western governments continue to give billions of dollars in multilateral aid, they refuse to open their markets to Third World and former East-Bloc producers. The author's of this book, as Peter Bauer notes in his comment, are the best in their field.