BRADFORD L. DILLMAN, State and Private Sector in Algeria: The Politics of Rent-Seeking and Failed Development (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2000). Pp. 172. $61.00.

Extract

The transition from a state-controlled economy to a market-ruled one always introduces a variety of challenges. These include ideological, political, and social resistance to change, a shortage of resources, structural inflexibility of the production system, and a weak or non-existent private sector. Algeria's attempt at change, which began in the early 1980s, faced all of these challenges—and more. Since the 1980s, the country has been suffering from a serious and multi-faceted crisis, and the political violence that erupted in the early 1990s forestalled economic recovery and contributed to the repeated postponement of substantive reforms. Meanwhile, all of the country's non-hydrocarbon sectors experienced negative growth, and a deep social crisis wiped out most of the progress made in human development since the 1970s.