Trading Down: Africa, Value Chains, and the Global Economy

Abstract

This book analyzed the effects of some key changes in the global economy on African countries South of the Sahara. Africa has rarely been the main subject of the growing literature on economic globalization. It is either ignored as ‘marginal’ in the dynamics of global economic change, or is represented as a case study among others. When individual African countries are actually examined in this literature, it is often South Africa that speaks for the continent – hardly the case of appropriate representation. This book fills this gap by putting Africa firmly at the nexus of the economic globalization-development debate. It shows that there are uneven trajectories within the continent, depending on the value chain analyzed and the regulatory structure of the country under study. The kinds of opportunities and constraints that African countries face have also varied in time in relation to changing international trade regimes and global business strategies. There have been cases...