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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Understanding Uneven Agricultural Liberalisation in Madagascar |
Author: | Barrett, Christopher B. |
Year: | 1994 |
Periodical: | Journal of Modern African Studies |
Volume: | 32 |
Issue: | 3 |
Period: | September |
Pages: | 449-476 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | Madagascar |
Subjects: | market economy economic policy agriculture Agriculture, Natural Resources and the Environment Development and Technology Economics and Trade Politics and Government |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/161984 |
Abstract: | Madagascar's change from a command to a market-oriented economy indicates the strength of pressures - domestic, foreign, and bureaucratic - to liberalize. While the broad picture in Madagascar suggests the sort of dramatic reforms often claimed by the World Bank and the IMF, four case studies - the devaluation of the Malagasy franc, rice marketing and pricing policy, the rice buffer stock facility, and the management of the rural roads network - reveal a much more uneven pattern. Technical or protracted policy choices have remained somewhat insulated from reformist pressures so that Madagascar's policy elites have been able to continue business as usual on selected issues, and, on others, to obfuscate changes with contradictory decrees and informal reproduction of previously formal, illiberal arrangements. While the broad tendency has been strongly towards liberalization, the recent history of the agricultural sector reveals resistance and reversals which suggest that liberalism has certainly not achieved an unabashed victory in either material or ideological spheres. Notes, ref. |