Practitioners in Development series: Botchwey provides an African perspective on new thinking on development strategy

• Author: Jacqueline Irving
• Position: IMF External Relations Department
• Pages: 109-110

Page 109

The onset of the new millennium has focused the international community's attention on poverty that continues to afflict much of the developing world- especially in South Asia and Africa-despite two decades of policy reform. The current rethinking of development theory and practice has evolved partly, Botchwey said, from a vigorous debate among economists, development practitioners, and others on the merits and weaknesses of the "Washington Consensus"-a set of policy reforms that promoted growth and macroeconomic stability through deregulation, liberalization, privatization, and fiscal discipline.

Within the World Bank-and among academic economists and practitioners generally-African development is now seen as a "more thoroughgoing process of transformation." This new thinking on development, Botchwey noted, has designated poverty reduction as the overriding goal and made empowerment of poor people and their participation in decisions affecting their lives key elements.

But Botchwey cautioned that the depth and extent of this change can be exaggerated. Several aspects of the emerging paradigm need to be further researched and refined to make the new thinking operational- notably, he said, governance and institutions, empowerment and participation of the poor, national ownership of policy reforms, and the dynamics of aid and private resource flows.

Institutions take time

Botchwey criticized the current focus on governance and institutions in the new development strategy for giving the impression of generalized corruption in Africa without backing this up with sufficient analytical work on the concrete and varied manifestations of bad governance. As a consequence, he said, attention is diverted from an examination of the real causes of market failure and what is needed to improve the efficiency of nonmarket institutions and to rein in the influence of informal layers of power.

Botchwey also noted that the current discussion on development fails to allow countries sufficient leeway to take into account the dynamics of fiscal spending during an election year. These dynamics can temporarily affect economic management in African countries as much as they do in democracies elsewhere. And, arguing that institution building is always a lengthy and complex process, he urged that African institutions be allowed enough time to evolve.

While Botchwey...