ABSTRACT
The design of economic policy in Africa has been, and continues to be, hampered by dependence upon misleading units of analysis inherited from venerable models that were developed in a radically different social context. We think about “firms” that produce, interacting through markets with “households” that consume, and about small enterprises in which the roles of the “household” and the “firm” are merged. It is increasingly clear, however, that the very definition of the core units of the “household” and “firm” are problematic in many African contexts and that the facile use of these concepts can lead to misleading judgments about the process of economic development.
