Business and the State in Africa: Economic Policy-Making in the Neo-Liberal Era
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 6/26/2008
EAN 9780521713719, ISBN10: 0521713714
Paperback, 306 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm
Language: English
The dominant developmental approach in Africa over the last twenty years has been to advocate the role of markets and the private sector in restoring economic growth. Recent thinking has also stressed the need for 'ownership' of economic reform by the populations of developing countries, particularly the business community. This book studies the business-government interactions of four African countries: Ghana, Zambia, South Africa and Mauritius. Employing a historical institutionalist approach, Antoinette Handley considers why and how business in South Africa and Mauritius has developed the capacity to constructively contest the making of economic policy while, conversely, business in Zambia and Ghana has struggled to develop any autonomous political capacity. Paying close attention to the mutually constitutive interactions between business and the state, Handley considers the role of timing and how ethnicised and racialised identities can affect these interactions in profound and consequential ways.
Introduction
the African business class and development
Part I. Institutionalizing Constructive Contestation
1. Ethnicity, race, and the development of the South African business class, 1870–1989
2. The neo-liberal era in South Africa
negotiating capitalist development
3. Business and government in Mauritius
public hostility, private pragmatism
Part II. Business and the Neo-patrimonial State
4. The emergence of neo-patrimonial business in Ghana, 1850–1989
5. State-dominant reform
Ghana in the 1990s and 2000s
6. Business and government in Zambia
too close for comfort
Conclusion
comparatively speaking
the business of economic policymaking.