ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the political role of exporting businesses, and the relationship of these businesses to the state, rather than on 'business' as a whole. The willingness of the international financial institutions to focus on essentials and provide long-term support for Ghana's development budget was to be crucial in engineering the country's shift away from the natural resource curse and from domination by rent-seekers. Zambia, Venezuela and Nigeria, by contrast with the countries, failed in terms of growth and poverty reduction performance because they failed to get to grips with the problem of urban bias — relentless pressure by their elite for cheap food and cheap inputs, typically delivered by means of an overvalued exchange rate. This in turn can be traced back to a power-structure in which business — notably small-scale agro-exporting business — had too little power in relation to the state to be able to form a 'strategic alliance' with it.
