ABSTRACT
The role of the state in economic growth and development in Africa has been a widely debated topic. From the 1950s through to the mid-1970s, development economists were very clear that to achieve sustainable economic growth and development, the state not only had to play an important role, but had to be a ‘prime mover’. Various concepts such as the “Big Push” (RosensteinRodan, 1943 , and later, Nurkse, 1953 ), the “Two-sector model” (Lewis, 1954 ), “Take-off” (Rostow, 1959 ), “Backward and Forward Linkages” and “Unbalanced Growth” (Hirschman, 1958 ), as well as Harvey Leibenstein’s “Critical Minimum Effort”, all bore an underlying assumption that the state should be the driver, planner, coordinator and deliverer of growth and development. Most pioneers of development economics had a strong conviction that development and industrialisation in less developed countries (LDCs) needed deliberate, coordinated, guided and intensive effort from the state (see Hirschman, 1981 ). During the post-World War Two period right up to the mid-1970s, the view that the markets were “inadequate for the ‘great development project’ on account of several failures necessitating the use of planning to address coordination failures” was dominant (Ndulu, 2008 : 320). While in the three decades following the end of World War Two the state’s role in economic growth and development was taken for granted, serious debates about what role it should play in the economy emerged during the 1980s.
