The tragedies of a state dominated political economy: shared vices among the imperial, Derg, and EPRDF regimes of Ethiopia

ABSTRACT Conventional accounts of the Ethiopian political economy either neglect the combined effects of shared political vices across various regimes or treat them separately. This essay, based on informed analytical tools of power and property, tends to explore the basic anatomy of the Ethiopian political economy by exploring the shared vices across the three regimes in Ethiopia: Last Empire, first republic and second republic. Seen in this light, the study identified that, though different regimes come up with varied official policy statements and appear to be better than the other, the empirical realities speak of an opposite story. In shaping the nature, structure, power, and principle of economic development, the three governments have been taking a draconian position, suppressing the private sectors and intervening in the rural economy exploitatively. The shared vices of state domination overall development matters have brought the society under the converging tragedies of poverty, Neo-Malthusian crisis, migration, de-peasanization through dispossession and displacement. Based on this, the study argues that people have to own development narratives and ultimate decision-making power to better design the development skeleton and to guarantee themselves a positive teleological development discourse.