Reforms as a Domestic and International Process. Liberalization and Industry in the Ivory Coast

Abstract

In view of the failure of the structural adjustment programmes implemented in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in the early 1980s, academic research now concentrates on analysing aspects which are not purely macroeconomic and which take into account resistance to reform as well as its negative effects. This has led to a political economy approach to reform, backed by an international political economy approach to developing countries.¹ Its concepts give preference to the role of international organizations and external aid agencies, their interaction with local institutions and groups, and the concrete process of implementing reforms, particularly conditionalities and the reactions they provoke, depending on the specific trajectories of the states and societies.² The theories focusing on market failures have reinforced these analyses, stressing the importance of institutions as a means of reducing risk and uncertainty. Conditionalities often entail ‘an exchange of policy changes for external financing’³ and limited to repeated games between bilateral and multilateral aid agencies and developing states. These games are, however, asymmetrical, and in the 1990s there was a certain amount of criticism of the effectiveness and role of aid institutions — so-called ‘aid fatigue’ (Van der Walle and Johnston, 1996).