Rural Responses to Industrialization: A Study of Village Zambia

Abstract

appear to believe that if a Head of State says that a new railway must be built, it will be, although the odds are that it will not be. There are very few inaccuracies, so far as can be determined, although I know of no evidence that Zambia actually shipped copper through Rhodesia after the border closure (the Zaire transit traffic to Rhodesia was permitted, of course, as is well known). And trans-African flights from Lagos to Nairobi certainly have been in operation at least since I962 (p. I57). The most serious limitation is the almost complete lack of material on transport economics. For example, the authors support a railway along the West African coast, although the economic justification for this is probably very slight. They seem almost to be unaware of the substitutability of rail and road transport, and fail to recognise that only in rare instances is additional railway construction in Africa likely to be justified. They likewise assume that the building of a new railway into an area will have a great effect in stimulating economic development when it has been demonstrated rather clearly by R. Hofmeier, A. M. O'Connor, and others, that this has not been true in recent decades. Some new construction projects may be warranted, as Tazara almost certainly was, but this is true only in very special cases. However, this comment is not meant to detract from the usefulness of the book; it is merely a limitation. JOHN F. DUE Department of Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign