Abstract
After independence, Sub-Saharan Africa experienced a rapid succession of economic, social and political issues. The magnitude of this crisis has led to attempts by international organizations and political economists to explain with two prevailing approaches: an internalist one and an externalist one. The externalist perspective predominantly attributed the responsibility of this crisis to deteriorating terms of trade and the instability of international markets, while the internalist one blamed mainly local policies. The purpose of this paper is to fill a gap in this literature, bringing the contribution of structural and historical factors. A weak institutional base, the low quality of human capital, and corruption created conditions for misguided sectoral strategies and unsustainable economic policies, making the productive sector unable to generate momentum in the economy and, therefore, producing economic and social stagnation in the region.
Highlights
IntroductionThese are elements of external, internal, and structural factors that characterized the severe economic crisis that affected the region in the 1980s
The article is organized as follows: In the first section, we scrutinize the contribution of the failure in domestic policies toward the worsening of economic problems in the Sub-Saharan region; we examine external factors and show how shocks and volatility in international commodity markets helped increase economic difficulties; in the third section, we integrate structural and historical factors into the analysis, highlighting those that provide an explanation for the economic exhaustion of the region; and in the last section, we draw a conclusion and give a general summary of economic inconsistencies that led to the collapse of the region1
A combination of the persistence of the policy to substitute imports and measures to protect industry, with the addition of an ideology based on state intervention in the economy, weak institutional capacity, and tendency to clientelism are factors that contributed considerably to determining Sub-Saharan Africa’s economic performance in the post-colonial period
Summary
These are elements of external, internal, and structural factors that characterized the severe economic crisis that affected the region in the 1980s. Bertella crisis: an internalist one, defended by economists from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and an externalist one, which corresponds to the position of economists from the African Development Bank and, to that of government leaders of the region who naturally did not want to accept full responsibility for the disastrous situation their countries were in The latter blames external factors, whereas internalists attribute the crisis to the failure in domestic policies. The article is organized as follows: In the first section, we scrutinize the contribution of the failure in domestic policies toward the worsening of economic problems in the Sub-Saharan region; we examine external factors and show how shocks and volatility in international commodity markets helped increase economic difficulties; in the third section, we integrate structural and historical factors into the analysis, highlighting those that provide an explanation for the economic exhaustion of the region; and in the last section, we draw a conclusion and give a general summary of economic inconsistencies that led to the collapse of the region
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