Economic Liberalization in Senegal

Shifting Politics of Indigenous Business Interests

Bibliographic Data

ID2595441
AuthorsIbrahima Thioub, Momar-Coumba Diop, Catherine Boone (0000-0001-5324-7814)
Year1998
Volume41
Issue2
Pages63
Publication date1998-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrican Studies Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-0206 • E-ISSN: 1555-2462
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/524827
OpenAlexW2025228609
LanguageEN
Citations received29
References cited13

Analysts of African business in the 1960s and 1970s stressed the weakness of the local private and its subordination to foreign capital and the government. Have economic liberalization and the shrinking of the state changed matters? This paper takes up this question in an analysis of Senegal. Here, relations between the state, foreign capital, and business interests have changed considerably since 1980, signaling what may be some of the most significant shifts in Senegal's political economy since Abdou Diouf's coming to power in 1981. There has been a shift of commercial control away from the state and foreign interests and toward the Senegalese informal sector, and clear moves away from the old pattern of clientelist-style relations between Senegalese business and the regime. In this paper, we argue that in spite of changes, the political clout and economic ambitions of Senegalese business interests are still limited by their weak hold on productive sectors of the economy. This is clear in the economic policy fights of the 1990s. Much of the contest is a struggle for commercial-sector advantage that pits old-style politician-businessmen against the informal sector commercial interests that have been gathering force in Senegal since the 1970s. These changes seem to have less to do with the emergence of indigenous capitalism than with diminution of the regime's ability to constrain and canalize the development of commercial interests. This paper traces these developments, grounding the analysis of the 1990s in a detailed empirical study of UNACOIS, a sometimes-militant business association that emerged in Dakar in 1990 to represent the Senegalese informal sector

Biology · Development economics · Economic liberalization · Economic system · Economics · Indigenous · Liberalization · Market economy · Political science · Politics · African history and culture studies · African Studies and Ethnography · Agriculture and Rural Development Research · Ecology · Law