Re-visiting Africa’s Political Economy Landscape
Claudious Chikozho presented a paper entitled ‘Re-visiting Africa’s Political Economy Landscape: Comparatively Articulating the National Macro-Economic Policy and Institutional Trajectories of Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe’ at the Regional Conference on: Building Democratic Developmental States for Economic Transformation in Southern Africa, 20th - 23rd July 2015. The conference was organised by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, Southern Africa Office in collaboration with the UNDP, South Africa, Southern Africa Trust and the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA). The abstract for the presentation is as follows:
The advent of political independence provided the majority of African countries with the opportunity to determine the appropriate mix of public policies and institutions that would enable them to achieve rapid socio-economic development. However, experiences across the continent have so far yielded mixed results and the search for an effective political economy model in the face of a rapidly globalising world remains an ongoing challenge for the majority of the countries. In this paper, I comparatively explore and synthesise relevant socio-economic development discourses and three Southern Africa country experiences that provide useful insights regarding the policy and institutional challenges and opportunities evident in this landscape. In the paper, I pay particular attention to a number of enduring but important questions that seem crucial to understanding and addressing the African political economy dilemma. For example, why do some countries in the developing world seem to be growing much faster, and have much better socio-economic performance than others? What are the crucial policy and institutional factors behind such differences, and what can governments do in order to improve the relative position of their economies? Indeed, what macro-economic policies and institutions should African countries embrace to “seize the day” in a rapidly changing political and economic world order? The major intention of the paper is to demonstrate the efficacy of socio-economic development pathways adopted by different countries in Southern Africa and identify alternative policy and institutional options that may enable Africa to attain a more robust political economy. Opportunities for realisation of a more robust national political economy agenda in each of the three focal countries are assessed and articulated in detail.
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