Focussing on two essential features of “SA”, poverty resulting from austerity policies and liberalisation, this paper draws attention to clear double standards of how much liberalisation economies can cope with, as well as to errors of judgement and embarrassing BWI-advice in the past. It recalls that “SA” existed well before the debt crisis but was unable to prevent it, and that adjustments of “SA ” itself remained superficial, largely restricted to nice formulations. But, whether now favouring measures to alleviate “SA “-induced poverty on efficiency grounds or rejecting such measures on principle as superfluous and harmful as before, the BWls claim to have always acted in the very interest of the poor.
