Structural Adjustment and African Industry

Sanjaya Lall

Chapter 5 in Learning from the Asian Tigers, 1996, pp 124-147 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Over the years, many analysts have despaired of the effects of structural adjustment on the economies of sub-Saharan Africa: the ability of these economies to respond positively to exposure to market liberalisation has been weak and faltering. The weakness of the African supply response has been particularly marked in manufacturing industry and manufactured export performance. Even the World Bank, the main architect of adjustment programmes, has at times shown disappointment with the failure of its recipes, though it has remained doggedly optimistic. However, its latest report on adjustment in Africa (World Bank, 1994) comes to rather optimistic conclusions on the impact of adjustment, especially on industry. Thus, Adjustment in Africa starts as follows, ‘In the African countries that have undertaken and sustained major policy reform, adjustment is working.’2 It finds that the countries that had the most improvements in policies had the strongest increases in GDP growth and that the ‘increase in their industrial and export growth rates was even more striking’. In view of the past debate on the effects of structural adjustment in Africa3 (following the established convention, the discussion of Africa covers sub-Saharan Africa excluding South Africa) these findings are important and deserve scrutiny.

Keywords: Market Failure; Industrial Policy; Structural Adjustment; Technological Capability; Export Performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

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

Related works:
Journal Article: Structural adjustment and African industry (1995)
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:palchp:978-0-230-38989-2_5

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230389892

DOI: 10.1057/9780230389892_5

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().