The Rise of China in Sub-Saharan Africa: its Ambiguous Economic Impacts

The paper analyses the economic relationships between China and Sub-Saharan African countries, including original contractual relationships that link exports from Sub-Saharan Africa to China and investment by Chinese firms in Sub-Saharan Africa. Unlike the 'traditional' partners of Sub-Saharan African economies (European countries, USA), these relations inextricably combine trade, aid and investment, which may create 'lock-in' effects. China's trade and investment focus on the commodities that are produced by African countries, which are crucial inputs in China's growth, with the risk of a growing dependence of African economies on the exports of raw materials and the negative effects that are associated with such dependence, especially in oil-exporting countries. Chinese investment, however, increasingly involves other sectors, such as the manufacturing sector. In addition, Chinese investment and aid have positive effects, such as the improvement of infrastructure, the lack of which being one of the key factors of the stagnation of African economies. The rise of China in Sub-Saharan Africa also implies significant additional resources and a welcome increase in the number of 'players'. The article thus shows the ambivalence of the impacts of China, which moreover substantially vary according to countries' export structure and the nature of their political institutions.Sub-Saharan Africa; China; trade; investment; aid

"Policy externalisation" inherent failure : international financial institutions' conditionality in developing countries

Conditionalities – i.e. ‘exchanging finance for policy reform’ in an asymmetrical relationship between the ‘donor’ and the ‘recipient’ – are central mechanisms of the reform programmes of international financial institutions (IFIs). As they are imposed by outside entities, they can also be viewed as ‘policy externalisation’, which is paradoxically a massive intrusion in the shaping of a country’s domestic policies. The resilience of such devices is remarkable, however. Indeed, in the early 1980s, many developing countries were facing balance of payments difficulties and called upon these international financial institutions for financial relief. In exchange for this relief, they devised economic reforms (fiscal, financial, monetary), which were the conditions for their lending. These reforms were not associated with better economic performance, and this led the IFIs to devise in the 1990s different reforms, which this time targeted the functioning of the government and its ‘governance’, economic problems being explained by governments’ characteristics (e.g., rent-seekers). The paper demonstrates the limitations of the device of conditionality, which is a crucial theoretical and policy issue given its stability across time and countries. These limitations stem from: i) the concept of conditionality per se - the mechanism of exchanging finance for reform; ii) the contents of the prescribed reforms given developing countries economic structure (typically commodity-based export structures) and the weakness of the concept of ‘governance’ in view of these countries’ political economies; and iii) the intrinsic linkages between economic and political conditionalities, whose limitations thus retroact on each other, in particular regarding effectiveness and credibility

From Growth to Poverty Reduction: a New Conceptual Framework in Development Economics

Since the 1990s, poverty and the ways to reducing it have become a central paradigm in development economics, not only in academia but among the international financial institutions (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund). Indeed, after WWII, thinking on development was focused on growth. A major shift occurred in the late 1990s, which has consisted in the replacement of 'growth' or 'development' as a goal of policymakers and international institutions and a central theme of research in development economics, by poverty and its reduction, together with an expansion of the meanings of the concept of poverty. The key points of the paper are that this shift represents a crucial turning point in the conceptual framework of economic thought regarding developing countries. It represents a narrowing of the agenda of governments vis-à-vis the previous one of growth and development, and the acceptance that development is no longer the priority goal of public policies, of governments and their citizens, and that the previous actions, policies and research elaborated over decades since the beginnings of development economics were in fine a failure. This shift is also an implicit substitution of difficult objectives with highly complex causal processes for concepts that can be measured and easier short-terms goals, such as lifting up specific groups of a population above a poverty line. These new objectives are also more consensual and attractive. The paper firstly presents key steps of the evolution of the thinking in development economics since WWII, then critically assesses the conceptual framework that has emerged at the end of the 20th century regarding poverty in developing countries, in particular its multidimensionality and the pre-eminence of measurement issues and quantification. It finally analyses the associated shift in policy-making as a result of reciprocal exchanges between academic research and policymakers and donors, which have helped to consolidate the new paradigm.Poverty; growth; development economics; international financial institutions

Amis, parents et alliés : les formes de l’amitié chez les Senufo (Côte d’Ivoire)

À partir du cas d’une société lignagère matrilinéaire, les Senufo de Côte d’ivoire, l’auteur montre l’importance de la notion d’amitié pour la cohérence de leur organisation sociale. Les diverses formes possibles d’amitié sont décrites, ainsi que leur articulation aux structures locales de la parenté et de l’alliance respectivement : selon le type d’amitié, parenté, alliance et amitié sont en relation d’opposition ou d’homologie, de compatibilité ou d’incompatibilité, et de transformation diachronique. Deux attributs principaux fondent la cohérence de ces trois domaines : la distribution des relations entre la distance et la familiarité et le fait qu’elles engagent des groupes lignagers ou seulement des individus.Using the case of a matrilineal society, the Senufo of Ivory Coast, as an example, the author shows the importance of the concept of friendship for the coherence of their social organization. She describes the different possible forms of friendship, and their interdependence with the local structures of kinship and marriage respectively. Each specific type of friendship can have an oppositional or homological, compatible or incompatible, or diachronic transformation relation with kinship and marriage. Two principal categories determine the coherence of these three domains (friendship, kinship, marriage): the evaluation of relations in regard to distance and to familiarity; the fact that those relations involve lineage groups or just individuals

Critical Perspectives and Political Economy of Development

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Experiments in Economics and their Ethical Dimensions: the Case of Developing Countries

Experiments have become widespread in mainstream economics, being viewed as a particularly rigorous method, especially ‘field experiments’, including randomised controlled trials (RCTs). This expansion of experimental methods raises questions of an epistemological nature - notably regarding the validity of an extension of results and causalities from the experiment to wider scales -, but also of an ethical nature. Yet the ethical dimensions of the use of experiments by economists remain under-investigated, though they constitute crucial issues, as experiments are presented as providing results that are not only more ‘true’ in terms of scientificity, but also more ‘relevant’ for policymakers. These ethical issues are particularly crucial in developing countries, where experiments have become widely utilised, their results viewed as guides for policymaking and resource allocation that would be more rigorous than all other methods. The paper thus analyses field experiments in developing countries, including randomised control trials, and argues that these experiments raise many issues. Firstly, these issues are epistemological and simultaneously ethical, as the ontological framework of experiments is utilitarianism and a conception of persons as individualists who rationally respond to inputs such as policy variations in isolation from social or political contexts. Secondly, these issues are ethical because experiments aim to guide policymaking. Developing countries are characterised by dependence on donors’ financing, with designers of experiments being often from donor countries, which underscores the importance of the ethical choices of the economists who devise experiments

Memberships, Hierarchies and Development: Evolutionary Perspectives On Institutions

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Low Political Equilibria, Political Economy and Growth, and Intermediate Organisations, Markets and Inclusive Growth

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Understanding Asymmetries among Institutions: Hierarchies and Cumulative Causation

Some institutions appear to exhibit ‘pathologies’, which are most often analysed in functionalist terms (‘dysfunctional’). The paper firstly underscores that the concept of institutional ‘pathology’ may be refined: it implies criteria, ‘pathologies’ being assessed in terms of their negative impacts on efficiency, income or welfare. However, many non-industrial societies (but also modern ones) have put in place different criteria of achievement. Conspicuous consumption or endemic warfare may be suicidal from the point of view of economic efficiency, but optimal institutions when status and honour are overarching goals. The paper then argues that institutions are concepts, which are moreover composite, in the sense that they include forms and contents that combine in ways that constantly evolve with time and contexts. They imply cascades of processes involving individual cognition and interactions between individuals. Yet there is a hierarchy in institutions and some institutions are related to others by sequential orders. In an evolutionary perspective, some institutions can be viewed as ‘core’ and more resilient, i.e. typically those organising group membership. The point is that in some cases this hierarchy in institutions may evolve in asymmetries: some beliefs, institutions and social norms may absorb or crowd-out others, which become subservient to the former. In terms of mechanisms, such processes typically rely on cumulative causation, self reinforcement, lock-in effects (‘traps’). Due to the compositional nature of institutions, these combinations and asymmetries among institutions are time and space-dependent, they are not ex ante predictable. Because membership institutions are more ‘core’ than others, the latter are more exposed to the abovementioned evolution, particularly those defining ethnic groups, territories, classes, or religions. Indeed, such an evolution is favoured by properties that these institutions have in common: the degree of fixation of beliefs is higher, they are organised in non-refutable devices and provide rewards. In the context of cognitive cascades and discontinuities, the institutions that have the strongest deontic force and capacity of providing security thus create the strongest incentives to adhere to them: they have therefore the greatest ability to persist, feed on and reduce the relevance of other institutions

Aid and Economic Development

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