The Political Economy of Inappropriate Technology: Industrialization in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Jeffrey James

Development and Change, 1996, vol. 27, issue 3, 415-431

Abstract: The failure of public sector investment projects in Sub‐Saharan Africa can often be described in large measure as a technological one, where technology is defined not just in the narrow sense of alternative factor proportions, but in the wider terms of scale and import intensity as well. In confining itself mainly to the economic dimensions of the problem, the existing literature fails to consider the reasons for the extraordinarily rapid and widespread expansion of the public sector in Sub‐Saharan Africa and it hence ignores the possibility that this expansion might itself be related to the observed patterns of technological behaviour in the sector. Such a possibility, I suggest, resides in the political and institutional compulsions that drive industrial firms in the public sector to increase the size of their operations.

Date: 1996
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