africa

Yale Center for the Study of Globalization
including in mine. The pressures from civil society have been enormous, and that
has made it more difficult for governments to engage in corrupt practices.
But I also say not everything is changing.
Very few countries show a clear development objective and strategy associated with
public spending. Related to this is the re-emergence of episodic growth in some
countries. While the public sector has improved, there is still inconsistency in the
delivery of public services. Corruption remains fairly significant, despite improvements.
Most importantly, growth has been associated with inequalities and largescale
poverty remains, even if some countries have seen significant drops in poverty.
Public spending on many things, whether on health, education, or infrastructure, is
less targeted and efficient today than it was a decade ago. And reforms in public
financial management have been much less purposeful in the last few years than
they were earlier. For example, in the midst of the economic reforms in Ghana
(1983-93), it was a lot easier to get everybody to focus on what had to be done on
the exchange rate, or on trade policy, and these were reforms that the government
pursued without too much interference from outside. Today I see African governments
struggling to do similar things, but showing a lot of reluctance to engage
in major public sector reform. In Ghana I see a lot of reluctance in government to
pursue an expansion of the revenue base, new taxes, or new ideas for reforming
the public sector. Indeed in the 1990s and early 2000s, one regularly talked about
public sector reform, but much less so today.
The absence of a new push forward is partly because the pressure from outside has
gone down. Today it is a lot more difficult than in the 1980s to expect aid donors or
lenders to give guidance to African governments on what direction to take. Many
African leaders still look toward donors for guidance. Some are still looking to the
World Bank to see what new development ideas there may be, but the World Bank
has not introduced any new ideas for the last 20 years or so.
The weakening of the policy debate in Africa is also because one does not find
within Africa itself a large constituency of people supporting or pushing for contin-
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