In response to the growing popularity of the neoliberal paradigm of the 1980s, led largely by the United States and its Western allies, this perspective now dominates the economic and political ideology of most sub-Saharan African countries. African states have readily adopted SAPs to continue receiving Western aid from multilateral humanitarian institutions. Conditional lending now focuses on market-friendly policies (Haque 1999). Privatization policies aimed to rationalize public sector investments and make developing country industries globally competitive (Noorbakhsh & Paloni 1999). SAPs force recipient states to privatize most state industries and drastically reduce the amount of social programs. These radical reductions in social programs can be highly harmful to an already weakened society with high levels of poverty. This is demonstrated by growing inequality and the increasingly serious deterioration of poverty conditions. In addition to worsening poverty and inequality, large-scale environmental deterioration is occurring in the Global South to keep pace with economic demands (Haque 1999). Market competition prevails over good environmental policy (Haque 1999). These neoliberal austerity measures are the main cause of increasing poverty and inequality as the environment degrades (Haque 1999). Not only is inequality increasing within developing countries, but so is a growing gap between capitalist nations and much of the global world. south. Despite the efforts of the SAP, the Global South continues to be under the control and influence of capitalist nations. SAPs emphasize economic growth, but fail to address widespread poverty among people (Haque 1999). In much of sub-Saharan Africa, “jobless growth” is evident where well pa...... half of paper ...... 1968). This creates a higher level of unemployment and underemployment. Work in developing countries is divided into traditional and modern categories. Much of sub-Saharan Africa works in traditional sectors such as agriculture. However, in an increasingly developed region, sectors are moving towards modernization (Frank 1968). As countries witnessed a process of deindustrialisation, the brain drain effect continued to harm a wide range of sectors in Africa. Between 1986 and 1990, 50,000 – 60,000 educated individuals left Africa (Lockwood 2005). The fact that these professionals left to work in the West was detrimental to continued development in Africa. When Africa began to develop, government spending on civilian professionals was unsustainably high. The situation changed dramatically in the 1980s, when civil servants' salaries dropped by 80% in value terms (Lockwood 2005).