David E Sahn, Paul A Dorosh & Stephen D Younger, Structural Adjustment Reconsidered — Economic Policy and Poverty in Africa, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999. 304 pages
After independence, most African countries adopted import substitution policies in an effort to promote industrial and economic growth. The result was the distortion of the economy to the benefit of small groups, while constraining agricultural growth and diversification. During the 1980s, the already acute economic failures in Africa intensified dramatically with a wide array of negative human consequences. Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in Africa grew less than 1% from 1979 to 1992. Exports stagnated, savings and investment declined and labour productivity growth lagged far behind other developing regions. Africa’s share of developing country and world exports fell significantly between 1975 and 1990. By 1990, Africa’s share of developing country exports of manufactured goods fell to an alarming 1.1%, from 7.8% in 1980. The continent was facing a crisis on an unprecedented scale that was exacerbated by a series of external shocks in the form of rising oil costs and falling commodity prices. Between 1987 and 1991, net official development assistance and external transfers to the low-income, debt-distressed countries in Africa increased dramatically, representing 15.4% of the real GDP of these countries and 75% of real imports as African leaders were forced to accede to donor and international multilateral prescriptions in an effort to stave off further collapse and social implosion.
The authors of this excellent study, all from Cornell University, seek to address three issues: do the trade and exchange rate, fiscal and agricultural sector policy reforms, advocated by most orthodox economists including the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, harm the poor? All three of these critical policy areas are traditionally associated with stabilisation and structural adjustment programmes. The authors concentrate on comparing economic outcomes ‘with or without’ the three policy areas rather than seeking to measure policy impact at specific points in time. The book therefore seeks to avoid the debate on the root causes of Africa’s economic and social crisis - traditionally a debate between those seeking to find the balance between the role of exogenous shock and the impact of domestic policy in precipitating declines in economic performance and living conditions, although the authors cannot avoid the impact of the decline in commodity prices during the 1980s and the rise in oil prices during the same period.
The analysis presented is country-specific, focusing on the effects of trade and exchange rate, fiscal and agricultural policies in ten countries: Cameroon, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, Niger, Tanzania and the former Zaïre. In doing so, the authors synthesise the results of a large body of empirical analysis, utilising a microeconomic approach in seeking to unpack the impact of macroeconomic adjustments. One of the strengths of this extremely rich and solid study is exactly the acknowledgement of the country-specific context within which policy application occurs.
In a separate chapter, the authors first seek to discuss the salient features of poverty in Africa, providing a description largely based on household data. By thus ‘profiling the poor’, the authors provide the context for understanding how various policy changes affect their well-being. Successive chapters discuss:
A final chapter presents a summary and conclusion. Although sometimes difficult reading for the economically illiterate, the book is rich in detail and analysis. The authors thoroughly dissect and implode the argument that structural adjustment policies are to blame for African economic failure and refute the argument that adjustment policies have negatively affected the poor.
The authors do not argue that ‘structural adjustment is good’, but that traditional structural adjustment policies have little impact upon the poor in Africa who are overwhelmingly rural, concentrated among larger households, polygamous households, refugees, households where the head is older, and households with high dependency ratios. In most African countries, women are particularly unlikely to be engaged in wage labour, both in the public and private sector, while there is a strong correlation between the level of education of the household head and the welfare of households in rural areas.
It is important for the authors’ argument to underline the fact that poverty in Africa is predominantly a rural phenomenon, and urban poverty is a less severe, although burgeoning problem. The impact of adjustment on poverty is therefore mostly determined by what happens to rural smallholders and the rural self-employed outside of agriculture, whose welfare is closely linked with the performance of agricultural — generally the most important sector in African GDP. Exclusive of South Africa, agricultural GDP per capita has been declining since the mid-1970s while per capita food production has generally been falling. In the absence of the adoption of yield-increasing agricultural technologies, most increases in agricultural output have been as a result of larger tracts of land brought under cultivation rather than the more productive use of land. In fact, the low level of commercialisation reflects an agricultural sector that is essentially subsistent in nature, with few linkages between agriculture and the rest of the economy. Since the vast proportion of the rural poor are self-employed (in excess of 90% in many countries), the size of the public or formal employment sector has little impact upon poverty levels.
Africa is seldom governed in the interest of the poor and the destitute and it is therefore no surprise that the authors found that the poor were generally better off with trade and exchange rate policy reform, while households that did have access to foreign exchange and imported goods at official (ie subsidised) market rates, generally a small urban élite, suffered significant losses of income, a major reason for their opposition to policy reform.
Across most of Africa, the state has historically failed to give priority to primary health care and education that would be meaningful to the poor. Instead, resources are misallocated to curative care, hospital construction and higher education that serve a small urban non-poor segment of the population. Coupled with poor management, lack of physical infrastructure, and shortages in key commodities that rely on scarce foreign exchange, there is little indication of the development of efficient social services in rural Africa. The authors go as far as to argue that expenditures on health and education are biased against the poor, especially in rural areas. Most African governments have far too many employees and much of government expenditure therefore produces no useful services, in effect becoming transfer payments to non-productive employees. As such, no one benefits other than the employees who receive salaries.
In seeking to understand the impact of adjustment policies, the authors expose the skewed structure of the African economy after independence. Excess profits (rents) associated with foreign exchange controls and trade restrictions were enormous in sub-Saharan Africa prior to policy reforms. In the year immediately preceding trade and exchange rate policy reforms in the countries studied by the authors, premiums on foreign exchange in the parallel markets exceeded 100%. In the former Zaïre and Tanzania, the parallel exchange rate was more than double the official exchange rate, and more than 1 000% in Guinea, Ghana and Mozambique. The trade and exchange rate policy reforms advocated by western donors in the 1980s therefore had an immediate and deleterious effect on their standard of living and entailed a sharp reversal in this approach. Devaluations and trade policy reforms that lessened import restrictions reduced these premiums from an average of 1 004% in the year preceding the reforms to only 25% in the year after the reforms. No wonder that the small urban élite so sharply opposed these reforms. For this small minority of households that obtained imported goods and foreign exchange at official prices for home consumption or for resale in the parallel market, trade and exchange rate policy reforms represented huge losses of income. Politically, these losses far outweighed the gains made by both the urban and rural poor through liberalisation.
This book is a sobering and hard-nosed assessment of donor conditionality, and while the authors seek to avoid such an explicit statement, the reader is left with two impressions. The first is that most analysts seek to rush too quickly when judging the effect and impact of structural adjustment policies. The second harks back to the old debate of implementation versus policy failure in Africa. Clearly, the research reflected in this study comes down squarely in favour of the failure of implementation rather than questioning the policies themselves.
Jakkie Cilliers
Institute for Security Studies
Pretoria
Eric G Berman and Katie E Sams, Peacekeeping in Africa: Capabilities and culpabilities, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) and Institute for Security Studies (ISS), Geneva and Pretoria, 2000, 540 pp.
The prospects for peace and security in Africa have recently received much expert attention in South Africa and abroad. As Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, indicates in the preface to this book, the topic of peacekeeping in Africa is important as there are indications that African states are taking on a greater degree of responsibility for promoting peace and security on the continent. In addition, Berman and Sams reviewed the tendency that the international community increasingly rely on regional and subregional organisations to secure peace. In this regard, the authors detail the efforts undertaken by African states.
Peacekeeping in Africa is divided into four parts. It contains a number of tables and maps, as well as annexes providing useful information on African participation in the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), non-African and United Nations operations. Part one introduces the reader to the conditions in Africa. Chapter one elaborates on the legacies of colonialism and the Cold War in Africa. It also addresses the issue of the declining role of the state in some parts on the continent. The chapter concludes with a section on the regional implications of the rise of intrastate conflict. Berman and Sams conclude with the statement that the challenges to African peace and security easily defy solutions. They maintain that African conflicts are multifaceted and deeply entrenched, and that these conflicts can only be resolved through sustained diplomatic and military engagement.
Chapter two focuses on the origins and evolution of UN peacekeeping, which could be divided in successive ‘generations’ of peacekeeping. Reference is made to post-Cold War peace operations such as those in Somalia. This chapter concludes with a section on the increasing reliance on burden-sharing between actors in peacekeeping operations due to the void left by Security Council inaction. Berman and Sams conclude that African states have begun to show a greater willingness to intervene in African conflicts.
Part two of the book addresses the role of African organisations and other ad hoc initiatives dealing with peacekeeping on the continent. Chapter three addresses the role played by the OAU. The OAU Charter does not provide for collective security, which could be a possible explanation for its legacy of non-intervention, as well as its efforts after the Cold War. The chapter addresses and evaluates OAU efforts in Chad, Rwanda, Burundi and the Comores. More importantly, it addresses the OAU’s peacekeeping and conflict resolution mechanisms. It concludes with a number of achievements and limitations of the OAU. Although the OAU’s Central Organ has only approved two peacekeeping operations, these provide a solid base to build upon.
Chapter four addresses the role and efforts of the ECOWAS. According to Berman and Sams, the initial efforts to secure economic co-operation created an important confidence-building measure to build upon. The chapter also addresses the creation of the ECOWAS Monitoring Observer Group (ECOMOG) and its activities in Liberia, Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone.
The historical development of SADC is presented in chapter five. Berman and Sams also discuss the efforts to develop a security framework in the region through the Interstate Defence and Security Committee and the Organ for Politics, Defence and Security. The chapter also investigates SADC capacity-building efforts such as ISDSC initiatives and regional peacekeeping training exercises such as Blue Hungwe, Blue Crane and Tulipe. SADC’s role in Lesotho (1994) and (1998) is also investigated. In addition, SADC’s efforts in Kabila’s Democratic Republic of Congo are also addressed.
Other African subregional organisations such as the Arab Maghreb Union, the Inter-governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) are addressed in chapter six.
African ad hoc peacemaking and peacekeeping initiatives receive attention in chapter seven. The authors discuss Zaïre (1977-1979), Chad (1979), Mozambique (1986-1992), the Central African Republic (1997-1998) and the proposed operation in Congo-Brazzaville (1997).
Part three of Peacekeeping in Africa provides an understanding of African peacekeeping abilities and limitations. This is discussed against the background of the UN’s 50 years of experience, ranging from Korea in the 1950 to Kosovo in the early 21st century (chapter eight). The enabling characteristics of UN peacekeeping operations and western-led missions are discussed in chapter nine. The chapter concludes with capabilities and constraints in this regard.
In part four, Berman and Sams address efforts to develop African capacities for peacekeeping. The role and efforts of the UN are discussed in this regard (chapter 10). The African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI), as well as other programmes to develop peacekeeping capabilities, and France’s role in Africa also receive attention (chapter 11). France’s involvement in training and subregional exercises are discussed as well. The efforts in Africa of the United Kingdom (chapter 12) are traced from the period of decolonisation to the development of African peacekeeping capacities. The UK’s African Peacekeeping and Training Support Programme is mentioned in this regard. Other bilateral initiatives in the development of African capacities for peacekeeping are also addressed (chapter 13). The role and efforts of Canada, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and other African states are discussed. Multilateral initiatives in the development of African capacities regarding peacekeeping are also addressed (chapter 14). This chapter looks at the role played by organisations such as the European Union, as well as international organisations with African members such as the Commonwealth, the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries and the International Organisation of the Francophonie. Other informal arrangements with the involvement of France and the UK, Franco-African summits and Nordic countries also receive attention.
The concluding chapter includes a number of general observations such as the growing demand for peacekeeping in Africa, while the UN’s interest is dwindling. African efforts to promote peace and security are numerous, but limited due to a number of factors. Western programmes are only a partial solution to the problem of African peace and security. Berman and Sams conclude the book with a number of specific recommendations:
Concerning actions to be taken by non-African actors, the following is recommended:
Regarding actions to be taken by the UN, Berman and Sams recommend that:
Peacekeeping in Africa contributes greatly to the understanding of African conflicts and efforts to resolve these conflicts. It offers a chronological and systematic analysis of peacekeeping in Africa. It is a publication that can be recommended for use by scholars, as well as by decision makers across the continent and the globe. Although African efforts to resolve conflicts were not always successful, Berman and Sams have indicated that there is a willingness by African actors to resolve the problems of the continent. It can only be hoped that decision makers and warring parties will seriously consider and implement the recommendations offered by Berman and Sams. In so doing, the ideals set out in both the OAU and UN charters to enhance human security could be fulfilled.
Jo-Ansie van Wyk
Department of Political Sciences
University of South Africa
Pretoria
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