Sub-Saharan Africa is in a deep economic crisis. For instance, the World Bank (1989:2) reports that Africa, a region of 450 million people in 1987, had a total GDP of around 135 billion US dollars, about the same as that of Belgium, which has only 10 million inhabitants. A similar indicator of Africa’s economic performance is the fact that Singapore, a small island of only 2.7 million inhabitants, exports some 50 per cent more manufacturing products than all of Sub-Saharan Africa together (Blomström 1990). These two observations indicate the seriousness of the problems dealt with in this book.