Institutional choices for low-income countries: state capacity, property rights and development paths in Tanzania

I am using the North Wallis Weingast (2009) framework to analyse the nature of the basic Limited Access Order (LAO) in Tanzania. Looking at Tanzania historically in terms of the creation of state capacity, I use Levy’s (2013) categorisations to place Tanzania in weighing up centralized state capacity vs strength of checks and balances and state dominance vs competitive clientelism models and identifying who the dominant elites have been, particularly since independence in 1961. Tanzania has strong state capacity compared with Zambia and various other Low Income countries but relatively weaker checks and balances to constrain state power; Tanzania fits better with a state dominance model than a competitive clientelism model in relation to dominant elites and nature of institutions. I combine this with an analysis of the history of property rights in Tanzania and following Boone (2007) outline the tensions between three types of property rights: communal, customary rights vs private individualized rights vs state user rights. Despite considerable debate within Tanzania (the Shivji Commission and other bodies), state user rights have won out over both customary and to a lesser extent private rights. I outline how the dominance of state user rights over property combined with strong centralized state capacity via its bureaucracy and patronage over jobs has underpinned Tanzania’s development path, in line with Bates (1982,2014) analysis for many SSAs. In the 1960s and 1970s this path was to redistribute resources away from small farmer agriculture towards a monopolistic nascent industrial sector in a push to develop industry, absorbing surpluses from agriculture in exportable crops (eg coffee, sisal) via state-controlled structures such as Marketing Boards. Other supports such as extension officers, inputs, training shaped which farmers were supported and controlled prices paid to farmers to subsidize urban wage goods and control urban unrest. Since liberalization in the 1990s constraints on agriculture have been loosened, but in practice the power of District Commissioners and Marketing Boards remain in force. Land, backed by state user rights, is redistributed for the purposes of urban and rural/industrial enterprise away from smallholder farming and away from communal rights. More recent enterprise development has been in agribusiness, manufacturing and construction, diversified across industries but concentrated in relatively few firms. (Sutton 2012). There is a tension between the combined forces of strong centralized state capacity, weaker checks on the state plus property rights that give the state ultimate power to determine land use, and the fostering of bottom-up agricultural enterprise, either through cooperatives or through individual private enterprise. Liberalization has favoured private industrial enterprise, although difficulties over clarity of land rights, availability of land and administrative issues over transferring land continue to be obstacles.