Pub Date : 2021-04-08DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2021.1891879
Barry Eichengreen
ABSTRACT In this paper I seek to understand the roots of South African macroeconomic outperformance since 1929 and whether it can be reconciled with what I have described as conventional wisdom about recovery from the Depression. Unsurprisingly, I find a way of fitting South Africa into that story. In addition, I try to understand better why, if going off the gold standard was so beneficial, indeed even more beneficial for South Africa than for other countries, it was so strongly resisted.
{"title":"Gold and South Africa’s Great Depression","authors":"Barry Eichengreen","doi":"10.1080/20780389.2021.1891879","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2021.1891879","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this paper I seek to understand the roots of South African macroeconomic outperformance since 1929 and whether it can be reconciled with what I have described as conventional wisdom about recovery from the Depression. Unsurprisingly, I find a way of fitting South Africa into that story. In addition, I try to understand better why, if going off the gold standard was so beneficial, indeed even more beneficial for South Africa than for other countries, it was so strongly resisted.","PeriodicalId":54115,"journal":{"name":"Economic History of Developing Regions","volume":"36 1","pages":"175 - 193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20780389.2021.1891879","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41796426","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-09DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2021.1882298
Mariusz Lukasiewicz
ABSTRACT The 1894/5 Paris boom in South African mining securities set forth the ultimate test of financial resilience for the South African Republic’s mining and financial sectors. The financial crash in Paris that halted the international boom in October 1895 exposed the globalized nature of markets for South African mining securities and their impact on colonial politics in southern Africa. This article reconsiders and qualifies the economic, financial, and political connections between South African gold mining and the Parisian capital market for the period 1887 to 1895. The Paris Bourse and its complimentary coulisse became the new loci of the South African mining market that ultimately crashed after the intervention of Johannesburg’s capital elites. Crucially for the future of the South African Republic, the Paris Krach set out the political circumstances for a direct confrontation between Johannesburg’s mining capital, British imperialism and President Kruger’s republicanism. Exposing new primary material gathered at the Archives Diplomatiques in Paris, the Paribas Group in Paris, the Central Archival Repository in Pretoria and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in Sandton, this article examines the globalization of South African securities, concluding the investigation with an analysis of the financial and political ramifications of the 1895 Paris Krach.
{"title":"Bourses, banks, and Boers: Johannesburg’s French connections and the Paris Krach of 1895","authors":"Mariusz Lukasiewicz","doi":"10.1080/20780389.2021.1882298","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2021.1882298","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The 1894/5 Paris boom in South African mining securities set forth the ultimate test of financial resilience for the South African Republic’s mining and financial sectors. The financial crash in Paris that halted the international boom in October 1895 exposed the globalized nature of markets for South African mining securities and their impact on colonial politics in southern Africa. This article reconsiders and qualifies the economic, financial, and political connections between South African gold mining and the Parisian capital market for the period 1887 to 1895. The Paris Bourse and its complimentary coulisse became the new loci of the South African mining market that ultimately crashed after the intervention of Johannesburg’s capital elites. Crucially for the future of the South African Republic, the Paris Krach set out the political circumstances for a direct confrontation between Johannesburg’s mining capital, British imperialism and President Kruger’s republicanism. Exposing new primary material gathered at the Archives Diplomatiques in Paris, the Paribas Group in Paris, the Central Archival Repository in Pretoria and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in Sandton, this article examines the globalization of South African securities, concluding the investigation with an analysis of the financial and political ramifications of the 1895 Paris Krach.","PeriodicalId":54115,"journal":{"name":"Economic History of Developing Regions","volume":"36 1","pages":"124 - 148"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20780389.2021.1882298","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42194452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2020.1858049
V. Chlouba, Jianzi He
ABSTRACT Does the legacy of direct colonial rule, through its impact on property rights security, affect rural development in Africa? Although mainstream economic theory links secure property rights to development, extant micro-level evidence from the continent remains mixed. We take advantage of a natural experiment in Namibia, exploiting as-if random application of direct colonial rule that later affected property rights security. Using detailed census data and matching on underlying climatic conditions, we find evidence of more commercialized agricultural cultivation in directly ruled areas. We relate this finding to differing tenure regimes. In formerly indirectly ruled areas where land is still allocated by traditional elites, own-account agricultural activity for the market and living standards lag behind formerly directly ruled regions. Our work has direct implications for students of colonial legacies and land tenure regimes.
{"title":"Colonial legacy, private property, and rural development: Evidence from Namibian countryside","authors":"V. Chlouba, Jianzi He","doi":"10.1080/20780389.2020.1858049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2020.1858049","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Does the legacy of direct colonial rule, through its impact on property rights security, affect rural development in Africa? Although mainstream economic theory links secure property rights to development, extant micro-level evidence from the continent remains mixed. We take advantage of a natural experiment in Namibia, exploiting as-if random application of direct colonial rule that later affected property rights security. Using detailed census data and matching on underlying climatic conditions, we find evidence of more commercialized agricultural cultivation in directly ruled areas. We relate this finding to differing tenure regimes. In formerly indirectly ruled areas where land is still allocated by traditional elites, own-account agricultural activity for the market and living standards lag behind formerly directly ruled regions. Our work has direct implications for students of colonial legacies and land tenure regimes.","PeriodicalId":54115,"journal":{"name":"Economic History of Developing Regions","volume":"36 1","pages":"30 - 56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20780389.2020.1858049","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43898637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2021.1878457
Carolina Román, Henry Willebald
ABSTRACT The increasing interest in economic diversification, technological sophistication, and production specialization again places structural change at the centre of the economic development theory. However, efforts to measure structural change from a long-run perspective remain scarce. We aim to fill this gap using a synthetic indicator that represents the dynamics of structural change in the long-run and allows us to identify different development patterns. We calculate this indicator including information on 13 production sectors, for a small natural-resource intensive economy (Uruguay), from 1870 to 2017. Our results adequately describe the development patterns that, according to the literature, characterize Uruguayan economic history. In the long run, economic growth causes structural change; only during the First Globalization period the opposite relation prevailed. The decline of the index – which indicates ‘backward movements’ in the production structure – is found in periods of economic crisis and downturn cycles. This dynamics reflects critical time periods associated with the (relative) primarization of the economy. In other words, near to each crisis episode, the economy reacted by going back to primary production probably due to the search for traditional comparative advantages or because in such negative phases the weakest and most exposed sectors were those other than agriculture.
{"title":"Structural change in a small natural resource intensive economy: Switching between diversification and re-primarization, Uruguay, 1870–2017","authors":"Carolina Román, Henry Willebald","doi":"10.1080/20780389.2021.1878457","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2021.1878457","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The increasing interest in economic diversification, technological sophistication, and production specialization again places structural change at the centre of the economic development theory. However, efforts to measure structural change from a long-run perspective remain scarce. We aim to fill this gap using a synthetic indicator that represents the dynamics of structural change in the long-run and allows us to identify different development patterns. We calculate this indicator including information on 13 production sectors, for a small natural-resource intensive economy (Uruguay), from 1870 to 2017. Our results adequately describe the development patterns that, according to the literature, characterize Uruguayan economic history. In the long run, economic growth causes structural change; only during the First Globalization period the opposite relation prevailed. The decline of the index – which indicates ‘backward movements’ in the production structure – is found in periods of economic crisis and downturn cycles. This dynamics reflects critical time periods associated with the (relative) primarization of the economy. In other words, near to each crisis episode, the economy reacted by going back to primary production probably due to the search for traditional comparative advantages or because in such negative phases the weakest and most exposed sectors were those other than agriculture.","PeriodicalId":54115,"journal":{"name":"Economic History of Developing Regions","volume":"36 1","pages":"57 - 81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20780389.2021.1878457","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43285238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-11-25DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2020.1830758
Joseph Keneck Massil, Sophie Harnay
ABSTRACT In a series of pioneering works, Douglass North argues that the institutional innovations taking place in seventeenth-century England as a consequence of a modification of the balance of power between the Parliament and the Crown provided the conditions not only for economic growth, but also for the development of democratic institutions later on. Our article extends his analysis to the study of parliaments in African countries before and after independence. We find that countries in which parliaments were established prior to independence are more likely to have efficient democratic institutions today. We define a variable of interest, ‘parliamentary experience at independence’, and estimate its effect on a democracy index. Several sensitivity and robustness tests confirm our results that parliamentary experience at the time of independence is a determinant of democracy in African countries today. This corroborates North’s idea that history and institutions do matter.
{"title":"Parliamentary experience and contemporary democracy in Africa: A Northian view","authors":"Joseph Keneck Massil, Sophie Harnay","doi":"10.1080/20780389.2020.1830758","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2020.1830758","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In a series of pioneering works, Douglass North argues that the institutional innovations taking place in seventeenth-century England as a consequence of a modification of the balance of power between the Parliament and the Crown provided the conditions not only for economic growth, but also for the development of democratic institutions later on. Our article extends his analysis to the study of parliaments in African countries before and after independence. We find that countries in which parliaments were established prior to independence are more likely to have efficient democratic institutions today. We define a variable of interest, ‘parliamentary experience at independence’, and estimate its effect on a democracy index. Several sensitivity and robustness tests confirm our results that parliamentary experience at the time of independence is a determinant of democracy in African countries today. This corroborates North’s idea that history and institutions do matter.","PeriodicalId":54115,"journal":{"name":"Economic History of Developing Regions","volume":"36 1","pages":"82 - 115"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-11-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20780389.2020.1830758","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48607310","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2020.1791699
Abel Gwaindepi, K. Siebrits
ABSTRACT The topic of this article is the development of the tax system of the Cape Colony from 1820 to 1910. This period was crucial for the introduction and diffusion of modern taxes, and the Cape constitutes an important case as the prime settler-colony in Africa. The article uses a new tax dataset and evidence from official documents to trace and explain the Colony’s growing revenue problems during this period. It shows that few changes were made to the tax system from the annexation of diamond fields in 1877 until the end of the South African War in 1902 and that the public coffers mainly benefitted indirectly from the Colony’s increased prosperity via railway earnings. This, it is argued, largely reflected the success of efforts by the mining industry to block the introduction of new taxes. The article emphasizes the unusual form of this resistance: instead of undertaking conventional lobbying activities, industry representatives obtained positions of policymaking authority in the Cape Colony’s then still immature system of democratic institutions. Hence, it draws on the experience of the Cape to show that immature democratic institutions can hamper fiscal capacity-building.
{"title":"‘Hit your man where you can’: Taxation strategies in the face of resistance at the British Cape Colony, c.1820 to 1910","authors":"Abel Gwaindepi, K. Siebrits","doi":"10.1080/20780389.2020.1791699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2020.1791699","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The topic of this article is the development of the tax system of the Cape Colony from 1820 to 1910. This period was crucial for the introduction and diffusion of modern taxes, and the Cape constitutes an important case as the prime settler-colony in Africa. The article uses a new tax dataset and evidence from official documents to trace and explain the Colony’s growing revenue problems during this period. It shows that few changes were made to the tax system from the annexation of diamond fields in 1877 until the end of the South African War in 1902 and that the public coffers mainly benefitted indirectly from the Colony’s increased prosperity via railway earnings. This, it is argued, largely reflected the success of efforts by the mining industry to block the introduction of new taxes. The article emphasizes the unusual form of this resistance: instead of undertaking conventional lobbying activities, industry representatives obtained positions of policymaking authority in the Cape Colony’s then still immature system of democratic institutions. Hence, it draws on the experience of the Cape to show that immature democratic institutions can hamper fiscal capacity-building.","PeriodicalId":54115,"journal":{"name":"Economic History of Developing Regions","volume":"35 1","pages":"171 - 194"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20780389.2020.1791699","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46633810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2020.1808457
Masataka Setobayashi
ABSTRACT China experienced modern economic growth from 1890 to 1937. The expansion of foreign trade contributed to this economic growth. However, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, dishonest practices, such as product adulteration, had been found in various transactions in China. In particular, adulteration was often a problem in the exports of goods from China. This article considers the reasons behind the emergence and resolution of a quality problem in the Chinese tung oil export market in the middle Yangtze Valley from the 1890s to the mid-1930s. Impure oil was customarily traded among Chinese in tung oil transactions; however, foreign merchants expected pure oil, which resulted in confusion in the market and a loss of business. Therefore, as the mixed oil problem became increasingly serious, market participants tried to create institutions to prevent adulteration. However, the formal institutions were not sufficient to resolve the problem until the 1930s. In China, the function of informal institutions complemented the imperfect functions of the formal institutions. More importantly, the institutionalization in the 1930s, which was associated to the Great Depression, was based on gradual change until the 1920s. Consequently, the quality problem headed toward a resolution in the 1930s.
{"title":"The emergence and resolution of a quality problem in the Chinese tung oil market 1890 to 1937","authors":"Masataka Setobayashi","doi":"10.1080/20780389.2020.1808457","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2020.1808457","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT China experienced modern economic growth from 1890 to 1937. The expansion of foreign trade contributed to this economic growth. However, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, dishonest practices, such as product adulteration, had been found in various transactions in China. In particular, adulteration was often a problem in the exports of goods from China. This article considers the reasons behind the emergence and resolution of a quality problem in the Chinese tung oil export market in the middle Yangtze Valley from the 1890s to the mid-1930s. Impure oil was customarily traded among Chinese in tung oil transactions; however, foreign merchants expected pure oil, which resulted in confusion in the market and a loss of business. Therefore, as the mixed oil problem became increasingly serious, market participants tried to create institutions to prevent adulteration. However, the formal institutions were not sufficient to resolve the problem until the 1930s. In China, the function of informal institutions complemented the imperfect functions of the formal institutions. More importantly, the institutionalization in the 1930s, which was associated to the Great Depression, was based on gradual change until the 1920s. Consequently, the quality problem headed toward a resolution in the 1930s.","PeriodicalId":54115,"journal":{"name":"Economic History of Developing Regions","volume":"35 1","pages":"216 - 236"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20780389.2020.1808457","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47430907","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-06-01DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2020.1762172
Carles Brasó Broggi, Jixia Ge
ABSTRACT Liu Guojun was a Chinese capitalist who owned textile mills in Republican China. During the war against Japan, his enterprises survived in several cities while he wrote essays about the prospects of China’s economic recovery. He developed a fine sense of the post-war world economy and participated in discussions about China’s economic development. In 1949 he decided to stay in the People’s Republic of China, continuing with his work in the textile business and entering the political administration of Jiangsu and the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. During this transitional period, he wrote an economic plan for the development of China’s textile industry, specifying how this industry should nurture other economic sectors and help to improve both the standards of living and the education of the Chinese people. This article aims to discuss China’s late economic development through Liu Guojun’s publications and writings that have recently been available to scholars. The article suggests that Liu Guojun anticipated some key factors that drove China’s economic reform to succeed in 1978, such as the importance of light industries, given the resource endowments of the country and the situation of the post-war economic recovery.
{"title":"Planning China’s future: Liu Guojun's conception of China’s post-war economic recovery","authors":"Carles Brasó Broggi, Jixia Ge","doi":"10.1080/20780389.2020.1762172","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2020.1762172","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Liu Guojun was a Chinese capitalist who owned textile mills in Republican China. During the war against Japan, his enterprises survived in several cities while he wrote essays about the prospects of China’s economic recovery. He developed a fine sense of the post-war world economy and participated in discussions about China’s economic development. In 1949 he decided to stay in the People’s Republic of China, continuing with his work in the textile business and entering the political administration of Jiangsu and the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. During this transitional period, he wrote an economic plan for the development of China’s textile industry, specifying how this industry should nurture other economic sectors and help to improve both the standards of living and the education of the Chinese people. This article aims to discuss China’s late economic development through Liu Guojun’s publications and writings that have recently been available to scholars. The article suggests that Liu Guojun anticipated some key factors that drove China’s economic reform to succeed in 1978, such as the importance of light industries, given the resource endowments of the country and the situation of the post-war economic recovery.","PeriodicalId":54115,"journal":{"name":"Economic History of Developing Regions","volume":"35 1","pages":"155 - 170"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20780389.2020.1762172","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42161039","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-03DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2019.1669444
Calumet Links, J. Fourie, E. Green
ABSTRACT The substitutability of the economic institution of slave labour has often been assumed as a given. Apart from some capital investment to retrain slaves for a different task, essentially their labour could be substituted for any other form of labour. This paper questions that assumption by using a longitudinal study of the Graaff-Reinet district on the eastern frontier of South Africa’s Cape Colony. We calculate the Hicksian elasticity of complementarity coefficients for each year of a 22-year combination of cross-sectional tax datasets (1805–1828) to test whether slave labour was substitutable for other forms of labour. We find that slave labour, indigenous labour and settler family labour were not substitutable over the period of the study. This lends credence to the finding that slave and family labour were two different inputs in agricultural production. Indigenous khoe labour and slave labour remain complements throughout the period of the study even when khoe labour becomes scarce after the frontier conflicts. We argue that the non-substitutability of slave labour was due to the settlers’ need to acquire labourers with location-specific skills such as the indigenous khoe, and that slaves may have served a purpose other than as a source of unskilled labour, such as for artisan skills or for collateral.
{"title":"The substitutability of slaves: Evidence from the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony","authors":"Calumet Links, J. Fourie, E. Green","doi":"10.1080/20780389.2019.1669444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2019.1669444","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The substitutability of the economic institution of slave labour has often been assumed as a given. Apart from some capital investment to retrain slaves for a different task, essentially their labour could be substituted for any other form of labour. This paper questions that assumption by using a longitudinal study of the Graaff-Reinet district on the eastern frontier of South Africa’s Cape Colony. We calculate the Hicksian elasticity of complementarity coefficients for each year of a 22-year combination of cross-sectional tax datasets (1805–1828) to test whether slave labour was substitutable for other forms of labour. We find that slave labour, indigenous labour and settler family labour were not substitutable over the period of the study. This lends credence to the finding that slave and family labour were two different inputs in agricultural production. Indigenous khoe labour and slave labour remain complements throughout the period of the study even when khoe labour becomes scarce after the frontier conflicts. We argue that the non-substitutability of slave labour was due to the settlers’ need to acquire labourers with location-specific skills such as the indigenous khoe, and that slaves may have served a purpose other than as a source of unskilled labour, such as for artisan skills or for collateral.","PeriodicalId":54115,"journal":{"name":"Economic History of Developing Regions","volume":"35 1","pages":"122 - 98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20780389.2019.1669444","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43307303","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-05-03DOI: 10.1080/20780389.2020.1757425
Ebes Esho, G. Verhoef
ABSTRACT Findings from research on emerging market multinationals (EMNEs) have posed some intriguing questions to scholars. While some of the questions are easy to explain through the lens of extant theories, others are more complex. Research on African multinationals is limited and being only a recent phenomenon, historical accounts of their internationalization is scarce. Early findings suggest that African firms exhibit distinct internationalization behaviour from other EMNEs. However, are EMNEs from Africa and their internationalization behaviour unique? This paper expounds the internationalization of three nascent African multinationals through the lens of extant theories and finds that multiple theories converge to explain their internationalization. Their distinct paths to internationalization come from their independent efforts in navigating Africa's diverse, and sometimes extreme, contextual challenges and opportunities. Alongside the global orientation of founders that originates from their education and experience, relationships from founders’ networks also play a dominant role in the internationalization process of African EMNEs. The conditions for business, especially for internationalization, in Africa are unique, and sometimes extreme. Institutional voids and informal markets, for example, are pervasive and huge. However, the African context enables a nuanced understanding of extant theories and the linkages between theories in explaining internationalization of EMNEs.
{"title":"Beyond national markets: The case of emerging African multinationals","authors":"Ebes Esho, G. Verhoef","doi":"10.1080/20780389.2020.1757425","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20780389.2020.1757425","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Findings from research on emerging market multinationals (EMNEs) have posed some intriguing questions to scholars. While some of the questions are easy to explain through the lens of extant theories, others are more complex. Research on African multinationals is limited and being only a recent phenomenon, historical accounts of their internationalization is scarce. Early findings suggest that African firms exhibit distinct internationalization behaviour from other EMNEs. However, are EMNEs from Africa and their internationalization behaviour unique? This paper expounds the internationalization of three nascent African multinationals through the lens of extant theories and finds that multiple theories converge to explain their internationalization. Their distinct paths to internationalization come from their independent efforts in navigating Africa's diverse, and sometimes extreme, contextual challenges and opportunities. Alongside the global orientation of founders that originates from their education and experience, relationships from founders’ networks also play a dominant role in the internationalization process of African EMNEs. The conditions for business, especially for internationalization, in Africa are unique, and sometimes extreme. Institutional voids and informal markets, for example, are pervasive and huge. However, the African context enables a nuanced understanding of extant theories and the linkages between theories in explaining internationalization of EMNEs.","PeriodicalId":54115,"journal":{"name":"Economic History of Developing Regions","volume":"35 1","pages":"71 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2020-05-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20780389.2020.1757425","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48037746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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