Malaŵi and Madagascar
This volume is the first of several emerging from the comparative study, "The Political Economy of Poverty, Equity, and Growth", sponsored by the World Bank. Malawi and Madagascar were paired for a joint study because they represent two low income East African countries with similar initial conditions of development. Popularly, Malawi is regarded as an example of African capitalism and Madagascar as one of African socialism. The author provides an analysis of the real nature of their underlying similarities and differences. For example, he shows that Malawi may be regarded as more socialistic than Madagascar in its ratio of public expenditure and public investment to gross domestic product. But he also shows that Malawi has followed a very businesslike "capitalist" method of running its state-owned enterprises on a strictly profit-earning basis. However, the failure of Madagascar's "socialist" policies of industrialization based on capital-intensive import substitution does not seem to be different from the failures of such policies in other developing countries - whether capitalist or socialist in their philosophical orientation
Print Book, English, ©1990
Published for the World Bank [by] Oxford University Press, Oxford [England], ©1990