• Adjustment does not necessarily increase poverty • Adjusting before a crisis reduces social costs • Refusal to adjust and the suspension of imports leads to self-centred underdevelopment, which is socially much more costly • The choice of macroeconomic stabilisation measures is important: the same result can be obtained with higher or lower social costs • Some structural adjustment measures have beneficial social effects but others, like the reorganisation of public enterprises, involve high costs • Action by donor countries is indispensable to offset the increase in poverty linked to stabilisation measures and to the reduction of employment in public enterprises