موانع نهادی برای توسعه اقتصادی آفریقا: دولت، قومیت، و سفارشی

To account for the African growth tragedy and, in particular, for its causes rooted in governance problems, the institutional legacy that African countries inherited from pre-colonial and colonial times must be considered. Three aspects are examined here. First, the relationship between ethnicity and state performance is bi-directional: if strong ethno-regional identities prevent the emergence of modern citizenship, they themselves constitute an endogenous outcome of continuous state failures. Second, the persistence of informal rules and social norms causes legal dualism, which undermines the credibility of modern statutory law. Third, social customs and norms that hinder socio-economic differentiation and individual capital accumulation lower the performance of indigenous enterprises.

A well-known and troubling feature of economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) since the end of the second World War is the divergence of African incomes from those obtained elsewhere the southern hemisphere. Noting the statistically significant and negative effect of the African dummy in their cross-country growth regressions, Easterly and Levine (1997) have talked about a “growth tragedy” to characterize the long-term economic performances of the African region. In actual fact, average real income per capita for SSA as a whole barely increased between 1960 and 2000, an outcome largely resulting from the dismal performance of African economies during the 20-year period from roughly 1974 to 1994. As evident from the World Bank's Tables, a negative annual average rate of growth of income per head prevailed during the latter period whereas a very low average positive rate of less than 0.5 percent was observed during the subsequent years, until the beginning of this century.1 It is, therefore, no exaggeration to say that African populations “missed out on the unprecedented economic transformation that took place in the rest of the developing world after 1950” (Ndulu and O’Connell, 2008, 17).

From the literature dealing with Asia, we have learnt that rent-seeking has been a pervasive feature of practically all Asian countries, including those that have performed best during the last four or five decades. What distinguishes them is not the incidence of rent-seeking as such, but the organization of rent-seeking and the identity of rent seekers. The differences have historical origins going back to colonial times. In particular, the ‘fragmented clientelism’ afflicting the Indian subcontinent (India, Bangladesh and Pakistan), colonized by the British, seems to have been much less conducive to economic growth and efficiency than the pattern of coordinated and centralized patron–client flows found in South Korea and Taiwan, colonized by Japan. While in the former area, there existed decentralized centres of organizational and political power that had the ability to demand or protect redistributive rents effectively, in the latter countries, the central leadership of the state could use a carrot-and-stick strategy to induce learning but also block feather-bedding. As a result, in South Korea and Taiwan the rents of the emerging capitalists were protected only in so far as their use was in conformity with the calculations and interests of the political leadership, whereas in the Indian subcontinent they were guaranteed by independent political factions purchased by these capitalists and unconcerned with the productive use of the rents (Khan, 2000, 91–98; Kohli, 2004). Southeast Asian countries, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore, stand somewhere in between these two forms of clientelism (Studwell, 2007).