For over forty years the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) has worked with countries in the developing world on the complex issues of economic and social sector reform. This volume describes the experience of the Institute in the challenging development assistance world of the 1980s and early 1990s, when HIID's largest projects involved work with countries attempting to move away from high levels of government intervention to more market-friendly systems.

These efforts involved work in formerly centrally planned command economies (e.g., Russia and Vietnam) as well as in the mixed plan/market economies of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The volume also describes HIID's efforts to work on reform in the fields of education and health as well as in the rapidly expanding area of environmental economics and policy.