Colonial Legacies and Social Welfare Regimes in Africa: An Empirical Exercise

Thandika Mkandawire

Chapter 5 in The Politics of Domestic Resource Mobilization for Social Development, 2020, pp 139-172 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Mkandawire identifies three types of welfare regimes in Africa based on the insight that tax and expenditure regimes are closely associated. The author highlights historical legacies in current welfare policies using cluster analysis to demonstrate that today’s welfare regimes in Africa have been strongly determined by the ways in which different countries were incorporated into the colonial economy. Many current social welfare reforms are taking place in what he refers to as labour reserve economies, and are generally internally rather than aid-driven. He stresses the importance of thinking of social expenditure in relation to domestic resource mobilization, and argues that the focus on aid and social expenditure has tended to obscure this important aspect of welfare regimes in Africa.

Keywords: African colonial legacies; Welfare regimes; Taxation; Social expenditure; Labour reserve economies; Cash crop economies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:sopchp:978-3-030-37595-9_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9783030375959

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-37595-9_5

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Social Policy in a Development Context from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().