The Politics Of Africa S Economic Recovery

The waning of the Cold War means that major political powers no longer feel compelled to support African authoritarianism. Revised official consensus holds that, in Africa as elsewhere, political reform must accompany economic adjustment. According to this view, African recovery requires a reduction in the size and economic role of monopolistic and inefficient states, and their transformation into accountable liberal democracies. Is this a desirable and practicable political programme? Certainly, all over Africa the number of liberal democracies is growing. But can they survive and are they compatible with renewed economic growth? Richard Sandbrook answers these questions, and assesses the feasibility of the new political programme in reinforcing Africa's economic recovery. He argues that the programme has merit in the short term, but, in the longer term, a more self-reliant, state-directed approach should be adopted to ensure prosperity and durable democracy in the region.

In Agenda for Africa's Economic Renewal, ten experts from Africa, Europe, and the United States look beyond structural adjustment and identify the strategic elements that are needed to engineer Africa's economic recovery in the coming years. Starting from the considerable degree of consensus among policymakers and scholars about what ails African economies, the authors analyze the key choices that need to be made in the critical areas of agriculture, trade and industry, state capacity, and the social sectors. The authors consider these strategic priorities in the extremely fragile environment of democratic rule in many countries of the region, and they stress the long overdue need to focus directly on the political implications of economic policy choices.

African countries have experienced modest economic recovery during the 1990s. But these countries are caught in a vicious circle in which the existing economic structure cannot generate enough savings and export earnings needed to finance their development and mount a sustained assault on widespread poverty. Yet foreign aid has been cut back sharply and the continent receives only a trickle of foreign investment flows. New policy regimes are now in place, creating the right environment for external financing to make a major difference. Development finance is one of the foremost challenges facing African countries and the international community in the new century.

A special session of the UN General Assembly was held in Abuja, the new Nigerian capital in May 1988. This volume reproduces the major papers, lines of discussion and conclusions of the conference.

While the design of adjustment policies in the latter part of the 1980s has generally shown greater attention to their impact on growth and social implications, this book argues that several orthodox adjustment policies are still incongruent with long-term development in Africa. It goes on to discuss a development strategy which could lead to a much awaited economic recovery and improvement in social conditions in Africa in the 1990s drawing its conclusions from a general theoretical discussion and national case-studies.

In Agenda for Africa's Economic Renewal, ten experts from Africa, Europe, and the United States look beyond structural adjustment and identify the strategic elements that are needed to engineer Africa's economic recovery in the coming years. Starting from the considerable degree of consensus among policymakers and scholars about what ails African economies, the authors analyze the key choices that need to be made in the critical areas of agriculture, trade and industry, state capacity, and the social sectors. The authors consider these strategic priorities in the extremely fragile environment of democratic rule in many countries of the region, and they stress the long overdue need to focus directly on the political implications of economic policy choices.

Essay from the year 2002 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Africa, grade: 8,0 von max 10, University of Amsterdam (FMG), language: English, abstract: As a participant of the course ‘Abandoning Development: Africa and the Contemporary Economic International Political-Economic System I am asked to write a final paper about an issue that was dealt with in the course and which is also based on the literature, that was provided. Since I am a Political Science student, who specialized in International Relations, I deliberately chose the course mentioned above to learn about the global economicpolitical system and its impact on whole regions. The case of Africa, in particular of Sub Saharan Africa, provides the participant with some understanding of the relationship between the developed and the developing countries, it’s inequalities, dependencies and perspectives, that I came across in other subjects like International relations, International Political Economy, the Political economy of the Middle East, etc. In that sense I feel that this case of an entire unprivileged region, like Sub Sahara Africa, fits into that context which I have already studied. At the international level, the fate of Sub Saharan African countries is highly relevant not just for its 45 countries hosting 500 million people. The De-humanization of Africa, as Manuel Castells refers to, goes in line with the rise of information/global capitalism by the beginning of seventies in the last century. Consequently many of its states disintegrated, societies collapsed, causing famine, epidemics, civil war, and social/political chaos. If one perceives these deteriorating developments as structurally conditioned then one can easily see the link to the global economic system and imagine the consequences, leading to several scenarios that the global community will have to deal with. But rather than developing these scenarios, this paper deals with the issue, whether recent policies and tools to ameliorate the economic situation of many African countries are suitable and eventually led to improvement in economic and social terms. Since the early eighties neoliberal policies were introduced by US-president Reagan and the UK-Prime minister Margaret Thatcher. [...]