Macroeconomics and Marginalisation: The Triumph of Hope over Experience

The search for appropriate macroeconomic policies to entrench recovery and restore growth to sub-Saharan Africa is increasingly bedevilled by disputes over the trade-off between economic efficiency and equity. In the two decades prior to Africa’s widespread adoption of structural adjustment, macroeconomic policy ‘unmarginalised’ a number of economies—Angola, Nigeria, Zambia, Zaire—for limited periods, while marginalising the poor. Resource-intensive development of plantation agriculture, energy or mining achieved growth of an enclave economy nature with very little, if any, trickledown to the poor, especially the rural poor.