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Prospects for the Development of a Black Business Class in South Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Extract

The growth of business classes in Africa has attracted much interest since the 1980s when, in the context of severe economic malaise, the impact of the state on development was subjected to critical reappraisal.1 Out of this emerged a consensus that the abysmal economic record of the 1960s and 1970s could, to a large degree, be ascribed to the debilitating effect of an overstretched and swollen state. Official development thinking took this argument the furthest: at the core of the problem, it was asserted, was the expansion of the state's rôle from the preferred minimalist function of providing the legal and macro-economic regulatory framework for capital accumulation, to a more profound intervention in the productive process. As a remedy, the state would have to be restrained from usurping the primary rôle which the market's invisible hand ought to be playing.2

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Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

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71 Interview with Egan, 5 December 1995.

72 Davis, Gaye, ‘Politicians Opt to Police Themselves’, in The Weekly Mail and Guardian, 29 09–5 10 1995,Google Scholar and ‘How Good is Our Code of Conduct?’, in ibid. 31 May–6 June 1996.

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75 See MacGaffey, Jane, ‘How to Survive and Become Rich Amidst Devastation: the second economy in Zaire’, in African Affairs, 82, 328, 07 1983, pp. 351–66,CrossRefGoogle ScholarEntrepreneurs and Parasites: the struggle for indigenous capitalism in Zaire (Cambridge, 1987),Google Scholar and ‘State Deterioration and Capitalist Development: the case of Zaire’, in Berman, Bruce J. and Leys, Cohn (eds.), African Capitalists in African Development (Boulder and London, 1994), pp. 189204.Google Scholar

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77 Himbara, Kenyan Capitalists, the State, and Development, p. 6.