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The 'Africa rising' narrative sparked a lively discussion of the powers of orthodox economic policies to ensure good economic governance and attract private investments to further stimulate economic growth. The 2014 commodity bust and the Covid-19 pandemic effectively ended this discussion and triggered a critical examination of the fundamentals of the narrative. This study investigates how orthodox economic policies have affected the strive for structural transformation in a resource-rich economy like Zambia. It argues that there is a mismatch between the mostly orthodox policies that have driven policy formulation and the needs of the domestic private sector. Therefore, it makes a case for setting domestic market formation as a guiding principle for future economic policies, specifically by focusing industrial policy on business climate, rather than investment climate, and by focusing on capacity building, upgrading, and growth in consumer and inter-sectoral demand, rather than only liberalisation and good economic governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiences from developed and emerging economies inform us that close state–business relations (SBRs) are crucial for economic development and structural transformation. Based on the positive experiences from other parts of the world, most African governments have begun processes to establish collaborative SBRs. Amongst other initiatives, these processes include amendments to existing laws to facilitate public–private interaction, direct support to existing business associations (BAs). This article draws on an analysis of survey data from 210 local firms, complemented with qualitative data from interviews with 41 firms, 20 key informants and a range of secondary sources on the food-processing sectors of Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia. The article shows that businesses in these countries have limited policy influence, find policies and programmes to be inadequate when targeting the needs and requirements of local businesses and that BAs in these countries are poorly organised. In spite of initiatives taken by the states and other actors, including an increase in the number of formal relations between state and businesses, it is difficult to conclude whether SBRs are collaborative or collusive. The article contributes to the existing SBR literature by adding a firm-level perspective and by enhancing our knowledge on the usefulness of key theoretical approaches to these issues in an African context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The revival of China's interest in Africa is often highlighted as being an opportunity to provide African governments with a choice between development partners that may strengthen negotiation leverage and thereby carve out policy space to define and implement policies that affect social and economic development. This article critically reviews the most recent developments in Chinese and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) approaches to development finance to Africa. It argues that although we can detect a number of incidents that point towards more policy space for African governments, the revival of China's development finance does not fundamentally alter the power relations between African countries and their financiers, as the tendency now is towards convergence and cooperation between China and Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors—not divergence and competition, which could have created policy space as it did prior to the end of the Cold War. This follows the trend of other ‘emerging’ donors who increasingly play by DAC rules and thereby minimize the future possibility of playing out one partner against the other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The international development arena is currently subject to major changes in the geographies of power. In this article I analyse how and to what extent the (re)entry on the development scene of China, India and Brazil, together with increasing prices for primary commodities and improved access to international finance, has affected Zambia’s political leverage to set, implement and fund its own developmental policies. I argue that, while real changes in external financial flows comparable to aid from these non-traditional state actors are still small, these actors’ experience is providing Zambia with an alternative development model that combines purposive state intervention with market-based economic growth and integration into world markets. While Zambia may be taking the first steps in strengthening its ‘sovereign frontier’, the extent of this movement is still small and its development outcomes are far from assured. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The private sector is increasingly seen as a means of enhancing economic growth and alleviating poverty in developing countries. However, most private-sector development programmes do not take the reality of the private sector into account. This article examines the interaction between a Danish development programme in Ghana aimed at reducing poverty through business-to-business collaboration and the Ghanaian private sector. It demonstrates the importance of contextual knowledge in designing development programmes and proposes an analytical framework with which this knowledge might be obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]