Ann Seidman

The Distorted Growth of Import-Substitution Industry: The Zambian Case

THE importance of industrial growth is widely agreed in Zambia, as elsewhere. 1 In the post-independence era, Zambias manufacturing sector actually did grow at a rate exceeding that suggested by the U.N. experts as critical for attainment of the goals of the ‘Development Decade’ of the 1960s. 2 But the rapid expansion of manufacturing industry did not contribute significantly to the spread of increased productivity in all sectors of the Zambian economy.

The Need for an Appropriate Industrial Strategy to Support Peasant Agriculture

MOST economists agree that industrialisation should help to increase agricultural productivity and raise the living standards of rural producers. In the 1970s, however, manufacturing in sub-Saharan Africa, even including South Africa, grew at a slower rate than in any other region except South-East Asia. Furthermore, far from promoting the anticipated outcome, industrialisation in Southern Africa undermined peasant farm cultivation and contributed to the present crisis in African agriculture.

Towards Ending I.M.F.-ism (International Monetary Fund) in Southern Africa: An Alternative Strategy

In the 1980s, a financial crisis engulfed Southern Africa. Widespread evidence exposed the way that inherited institutional structures and technologies – reinforced by International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.) conditionality – had reproduced the regions poverty and vulnerability. 1 To overcome the crisis requires an alternative strategy built on theoretical foundations fundamentally different from the neo-classical models that underpin the ‘restructuring’ programmes of the I.M.F. and World Bank. The state must play a positive interventionist role.

Southern African contradictions: Part I, the role of U.S. based multinational corporations (MNCs)

SummaryThis is the first of two articles which seek to explain how the distorted growth of South Africa has enabled it to dominate and underdevelop the entire southern African region while itself becoming increasingly dependent externally on Western multinational corporations. A simple model provides the theoretical framework for this analysis. A brief historial sketch of the handful of powerful mining finance houses, led by the Anglo American Group involving U.S. and British interests, have joined the racist South African Government to build state capitalism and coerce the black Africn majority to work for less than subsistence wages. In this context, the largest U.S. multinational corporations, many of them linked through their boards of directors and financial ties to each other and high U.S. officials, play an increasingly critical role in providing sorely-needed capital and advanced technology to strengthen South Africas industrial complex. At the same time, U.S. interests are attempting to influence the South African black trade union movement to acquiesce to the basic structure of the resulting exploitative political economy.The second article will outline the way South African and multinational corporate interests have penetrated the political economies of neighboring countries to obtain low-cost labor, raw materials, and markets for their expanding output of manufactured goods.