IMPORT SUBSTITUTION INDUSTRIALIZATION AS LEARNING PROCESS: SUB SAHARAN AFRICAN EXPERIENCE AS DISTORTION OF THE “GOOD” BUSINESS MODE

The East Asian catch-up industrialization experience is often presented in the literature as a benchmark for Sub-Saharan African countries seeking to undergo an industrial revolution. A recurrent theme in the East Asian model is the use of the import substitution industrialization (ISI) phase as a basis for technological learning and international business. The East Asian countries used ISI to build up an industrial technological competence. Starting with the low- skill, labour intensive manufactures, these countries gradually moved on to manufacture more technologically complex products for export using competencies and skills acquired in the ISI phase. Typically, protectionist industrial policy featured strongly in the East-Asian experiences. Sub-Saharan Africa embarked on ISI as early as the post war II decades, consolidating that process in the post-colonial decades of the 1960’s and 1970’s and employing also protectionist industrial policy. However, in stark contrast to East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa’s ISI ended up in a cul-de-sac; it failed to develop capacities for export manufactures and even failed to produce enough to serve expanding domestic demand. Sub-Saharan Africa’s ISI and the protectionism that underpinned it could then be described as a distortion of the ‘good’ East Asian benchmark business model. This paper draws on extant literature to explain key aspects of the Sub-Saharan African model as a distortion of the good East Asian model. The paper focuses on the elements of the protectionism that featured in both models, the nature of industrial policy, and stresses the role of labour intensive manufacturing as a viable ‘entry route’ into export-based industrialization and technological learning.