IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fth/bellco/29.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Leadership Factor in African Policy Reform and Growth

Author

Listed:
  • Gray, C.
  • McPherson, M.

Abstract

In 1997 the World Bank's two vice-presidents for Sub-Saharan Africa attributed a significant improvement in Africa's growth prospects to the advent of a new generation of leaders, replacing their "once largely statist and corrupt" predecessors. This paper begins by tracing the evolution of African chief executives over the past two decades. Of 48 holding office on 1st anuary 1999, 22 were in power a decade earlier and eight already ten years before that. Examination of ten countries, with focus on Kenya and Zambia, raises the question: why, after these incumbents had presided over economic catastrophe, were socio-political structures unable to replace them with better leaders? A review of leading treatments of the political economy of economic reform highlights the dichotomy between interest-group analysis, versus studies that accord a major role to the unpredictable advent of individuals with qualities that, by promoting policy reform, help launch their countries onto paths of rapid growth.

Suggested Citation

  • Gray, C. & McPherson, M., 1999. "The Leadership Factor in African Policy Reform and Growth," Papers 29, Bell Communications - Economic Research Group.
    • Handle: RePEc:fth:bellco:29
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ECONOMIC POLICY ; DEVELOPING COUNTRIES;

    JEL classification:

    • O55 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Africa
    • E61 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Policy Objectives; Policy Designs and Consistency; Policy Coordination
    • H10 - Public Economics - - Structure and Scope of Government - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fth:bellco:29. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Thomas Krichel (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.