Public Choice, Technology and Industrialization in Tanzania: Some Paradoxes Resolved

Abstract

The public choice approach has already been used in the African context to explore the political rationality of policies that seem difficult, if not entirely impossible, to justify on purely economic grounds. A well-known study by Robert Bates (1981), for example, sought to explain why governments in Africa tend to adopt agricultural policies that are blatantly harmful to the interests of most farmers in the region. More recently, rent-seeking behaviour was used by Gallagher (1991) to explain variations in growth rates across a wide range of African countries. What has not been applied to any of those countries, however, is the area of public choice theory that deals specifically with the preferences and behaviour of government bureaucrats: the so-called political economy of bureaucracy. Yet, as we shall argue below, this important strand of the public choice literature helps to explain some of the most paradoxical aspects of technology and industrialization in the public sector of one particular African country, Tanzania.