The Technological Response To Import Liberalization In Subsaharan Africa

Many African countries liberalized in the belief that international competition would stimulate efficiency, growth and technological dynamism. The results are mixed, but largely disappointing. This book examines why, looking at technological reactions to liberalization in garments and engineering in Tanzania, Kenya and Zimbabwe, countries with different levels of industrialisation and differing degrees of liberalization. Its findings, aimed at practitioners and researchers, explain why the assumptions underlying liberalisation are often flawed, why capabilities differ, and why they lag behind other regions.

The purpose of this book is to fill the lack of micro evidences on a structural change of African producers. By collecting studies on single industries, we attempt to demonstrate firms' and farmers' responses to the recent economic trend such as growth of demand, emergence of FDI and improvement in infrastructure.

The Global Political Economy of Raúl Prebisch offers an original analysis of global political economy by examining it through the ideas, agency and influence of one of its most important thinkers, leaders and personalities. Prebisch’s ground-breaking ideas as an economist – the terms-of-trade thesis and the economic case for state-led industrialization – changed the world and guided economic policy across the global South. As the head of two UN bodies – the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and later the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) – he was at the frontline of key North–South political struggles for a fairer global distribution of wealth and the regulation of transnational corporations. Prebisch increasingly came to view political power, not just economic capabilities, as pivotal to shaping the institutions and rules of the world economy. This book contextualizes his ideas, exploring how they were used and their relevance to contemporary issues. The neoliberal turn in economics in North America, Western Europe and across the global South led to an active discrediting of Prebisch’s theories and this volume offers an important corrective, reintroducing current and future generations of scholars and students to this important body of work and allowing a richer understanding of past and ongoing political struggles.

Rent seeking continues to be a topic of much discussion and debate within the political economy. This new study challenges previous assumptions and sets out a new analysis of the dynamics of rent and rent seeking in development, using Vietnam as a case study. This book provides an alternative approach to the study of economic development and illuminates new perspectives in a contemporary context. It argues that not only has there been an incomplete understanding of Vietnam’s industrial development over the last three decades, but that neoclassical economics do not adequately address many of the issues endangering Vietnam’s development. A significant observation of the Vietnamese experience is the analytical view that rents can be developmental and growth enhancing if the configuration of rent management incentivizes industrial upgrade and conditions firm performance. Underlining the need to reexamine how economic actors and the state collaborate through formal and informal institutions, this study fills a gap in the scholarship of the political economy of rent and rent seeking and how rents might be used for developmental purposes.

Globalization and structural adjustment offer many opportunities for export orientated industrialization in developing economies. As a group, competitiveness in the developing countries has improved, but, while East Asian economies have had rapid export growth and technological upgrades, South Asian and African economies have lagged behind. Old structures, institutions, behavioural patterns and public policies are ill-adapted to deal with the challenges posed by technological change and economic liberalization. Consequently there is an urgent need for change in government and private sector attitudes and strategies. This volume seeks to generalise the lessons across developing country and enterprise cases, and sheds light on which trade and industrial strategies and instruments work best, and which do not work, in relation to manufacturing competitiveness.

This book explores the means through which the garment industry contributes to industrialization, poverty reduction, empowerment of undereducated workers, in particular female laborers, and shared growth in contemporary low-income countries.

The authors apply a Heckman selection model to the 2003 Investment Climate Survey (ICS) to investigate supply-side constraints to export performance at the firm level in Ecuador. To correct for the non-random truncation problems, they use the Heckman selection model to estimate the probability of exporting (export propensity) and the share of total sales that are exported (export intensity) by Ecuadorian firms. They develop a baseline model with 12 independent variables divided into three categories-idiosyncratic characteristics, technology, and business environment. The authors develop three other models with the addition of variables related to trade integration, business environment, and infrastructure. Results corroborate with the hypothesis implicit in the Heckman model, which considers both decisions made by a firm-whether to export, and how much of its sales to export-to be interdependent. In the Ecuadorian case, they find three important results for the firm's export performance: technology matters; infrastructure does not; and trade orientation is significant, with specialized firms tending to have smaller export intensity when their main trade partners are countries of the Andean Community, and the opposite happening if the United States is their main trade partner. The authors find a robust and stable relationship for export propensity and intensity with size, import of inputs, labor regulations, in-house research and development, quality certification, web-use, and foreign ownership. Also, capacity utilization and trade with the United States positively affect export intensity, while trade within the Andean Community has the opposite effect in the outcome variable. But they find no significant relationship for the infrastructure variables.