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The market versus state debate still shapes teaching and scholarly work on how latecomer firms acquire capabilities to become internationally competitive in industries new to their country. However, the developmental state approach underestimates the importance of firms as key actors in the articulation of economies into global markets and overestimates the role of the government. Industry studies filled this gap by showing how firms responded to government industrial policies, by identifying the mechanisms of technology leverage, and by underscoring the importance of aligned interests between foreign and domestic firms. Yet, we do not know under which conditions technology leverage happens and how the absorptive capacity of latecomer firms to leverage technology is generated in the first place. This article presents an explanation of the origins of absorptive capacity of latecomer firms based on a systematic analysis of the experience of domestic firms in East Asia. The framework emphasizes the role of transnational networks linking foreign and domestic firms as well as foreign firms' business strategies. The article then applies this framework to explain the emergence of an apparel export industry in Mauritius in the 1970s, an exceptional success case in the African region, drawing on original empirical data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks whether and how local firms in low-income countries can participate, upgrade and capture value in apparel global value chains in the context of increased entry barriers and asymmetric power relations. It focuses on Madagascar, which is the top apparel exporter in Sub-Saharan Africa and one where there is a significant number of local firms. The article examines the capability-building processes of local firms, which are the basis for upgrading paths and broader sector development. We do this by combining conceptual insights from the Technological Capabilities literature with the conjunctural approach to Global Value Chains and Global Production Networks. Based on extensive fieldwork in Madagascar's apparel export sector, the article explains how the relational, local and regional assets that local firms can leverage in building technological capabilities influence their choices with regards to export strategies and their upgrading paths. In turn, these assets are linked to different types of local ownership, and they emerge through historical legacies and the national socio-economic context, which give rise to specific transnational social relations, as well as through regional economic formations and global value chain dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local firms in new supplier countries face major challenges in entering manufacturing global value chains (GVCs) in the context of increased competition and requirements. To understand these challenges, we argue for the importance of looking more closely at local firm capability building, which is a costly and uncertain process and in the early stage of industrialisation was historically facilitated by industrial policy and leveraging foreign knowledge. This article examines the opportunities and constraints that Ethiopian-owned firms faced in building capabilities to enter apparel GVCs, using a survey designed to measure firms' capabilities and firm histories to understand learning paths. We find that local export firms had a large capability gap between their existing capabilities and what is required to enter apparel GVCs, leading to high learning costs and risks, while the profit margins were very low, and there were limited learning channels. Industrial policy evolved taking into account these constraints, but faced challenges in providing learning channels for local firms in the context of a weak manufacturing class and hyper-competitive apparel GVCs. This resulted in a learning trap where local firms do not even try to enter manufacturing GVCs, or enter but fail to remain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether low‐income countries can still benefit from participating in manufacturing global value chains (GVCs) in terms of broader industrial development in a global context of greater competition and higher requirements. It contends that developing internationally competitive local firms and domestic linkages, in addition to upgrading, is crucial for participation in GVCs to drive industrialization. The study focuses on Ethiopia's recent experience with developing an apparel export industry through strategic industrial policy. Based on original empirical data collected through firm‐level surveys and interviews with government officials, industry experts and buyers, the article analyses the upgrading and localization trajectories of foreign and local apparel‐exporting firms. It argues that value‐capture benefits in assembly positions in apparel GVCs have become more difficult. The potential for localization benefits depends on the type of global buyers and foreign producers and their levels of embeddedness, but whether this potential is realized also depends on local firm characteristics and related industrial policy. Ethiopia's industrial policy has been relatively successful regarding national economy linkages, but less successful in developing competitive local export firms due to a weak local manufacturing tradition combined with a global context that has led to a supplier squeeze. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many local firms in sub-Saharan African countries are failing to enter and upgrade in new manufacturing and agribusiness export sectors. This article argues that we need to look more closely at the costly, risky, and uncertain firm-level processes of building capabilities in order to understand this challenge. However, local firm agency is constrained and has to be situated in asymmetric structures that are determined by transnational interfirm relations in global value chains (GVCs) as well as the country and region in which local firms are embedded. The article presents a new framework for researching how firms build capabilities in GVCs, and demonstrates how it can be applied using the cases of apparel and floriculture export sectors in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Madagascar. The cases show that firms build specific capabilities linked to export strategies, leading to uneven capability-building, specific upgrading paths, and value capture trajectories. Variations in local firms' export strategies and success with those strategies are explained by differences in the financial capital, tacit knowledge, and social networks that they can leverage in building capabilities. The nature and extent of these intrafirm resources, especially in the early period of export industry development, are shaped by shared networks between local and foreign supplier firms, regional proximity to existing supplier countries, strategic interests of global buyers, and government industrial policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the global restructuring of agri-food markets since the 1980s, an impressive amount of scholarship has examined its impacts in African countries. However, little has been written on the emergence of local medium and large-scale commercial farmers selling to export companies or controlling their own export marketing arrangements. This article examines Ghanaian commercial farmers producing and exporting fresh pineapples to European markets. This group of pineapple producer-exporters represents a path to capitalist agricultural production that can be conceptualized as capitalism from outside: where capital flows into the countryside, rather than accumulation occurring from above or below within the agrarian economy. The emergence of this form of agrarian capitalism is stimulated by opportunities in new high-value agricultural export markets, but its stabilization depends on country-specific characteristics such as rural social structures, property rights and state support. The article documents the conditions of emergence of this new group of Ghanaian capitalist farmers, the period of destabilization caused by increasing international competition that resulted in a small number of large-scale agribusiness firms surviving, and the challenges that these agribusiness firms faced in stabilizing their capitalist agricultural production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The politics of public-service delivery continues to be neglected under the supposedly more context-sensitive post-Washington Consensus. Using interviews and documentary evidence from Ghana, this article provides an account of the networks of political interference and informal practices in Ghana's public water utility. It argues that, in order to understand why private-sector participation succeeds or fails and why similar arrangements have different outcomes across developing countries, we need to examine the effects of the informal institutional context, particularly the country-specific political settlement in which public-service provision operates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic transformation is driven by successfully implemented industrial policy, but industrial policy is inherently political. We cannot understand why some governments pursue and implement industrial policy better than others without understanding its politics. This article addresses the conditions under which industrial policies are successfully implemented. It presents an analytical approach to understanding why some ruling elite-capitalist alliances lead to better economic outcomes than others. Sub-Saharan African countries present a particular puzzle, given their low productive capabilities and the relatively small number of successful productive sectors. The article examines the most successful productive sectors in Mozambique and in Ghana in order to illuminate the conditions under which such alliances occur and their specific characteristics and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The global apparel industry has been a gateway to industrialization, but changes in the global economy have eroded the benefits from participating in apparel global supply chains, leading to thin industrialization in low-income countries where suppliers firms are squeezed between low prices and high requirements. More recently, buyers added improved environmental performance as a new requirement for their suppliers, seeking to avoid brand risks in their supply chains due to consumer awareness. This environmental upgrading focused on eco-efficiency gains, which increased productivity among suppliers while using fewer resources, but buyers captured most of the benefits in terms of maintaining low prices due to market power imbalances. This article aims to shift the debate on the limits of participating in global supply chains by conceptualizing the opportunities available to late industrializing countries from embedding the environmental upgrading of individual supplier firms within a broader green industrialization process, which offers more opportunities for value capture and inter-industry linkages through circular industrial economies. We use this conceptual approach to examine the newest apparel sourcing location, Ethiopia, and the government's green industrial policy that aimed to spur industrialization through apparel specific eco-industrial parks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the sake of less developed countries, it is time to adjust the discussion of international development assistance on poverty reduction. This article attempts to do so by reviewing new and old literature explaining why some countries are rich and others are poor. History has repeatedly shown that building up capabilities in manufacturing and improving the productivity of agriculture are the keys to wealth creation and long-term sustained poverty reduction. Furthermore, industrialisation and increased agricultural productivity are interdependent processes. Discussion about ending world poverty needs to be shifted back to consideration of economic transformation and the role foreign aid can reasonably play in achieving these objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the emergence and trajectory of a new agro-industry in Ghana, the pineapple export industry, using the technological capabilities approach. It explains the limited expansion of the industry and its declining competitiveness in the face of new competition by looking at how Ghanaian exporters developed technological capabilities initially and the incentives and disincentives to building on those capabilities. The article argues that at the heart of the industry's crisis was an inability to further develop technological capabilities. The crisis had systemic features that have broader implications for developing new agro-industries in Ghana as well as other African countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article introduces the special section on the making and remaking of agro-industries in Africa. It examines what the contributions tell us about how agro-industries work, but also why national industries work the way they do, how they came to be that way and what factors and forces drive or hinder their dynamism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a new analytical approach to the study of aid negotiations. Building on existing approaches but trying to overcome their limitations, it argues that factors outside of individual negotiations (or the 'game' in game-theoretic approaches) significantly affect the preferences of actors, the negotiating strategies they fashion, and the success of those strategies. This approach was employed to examine and compare the experiences of eight countries: Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania and Zambia. The article presents findings from these country studies which investigated the strategies these states have adopted in talks with aid donors, the sources of leverage they have been able to bring to bear in negotiations, and the differing degrees of control that they have been able to exercise over the policies agreed in negotiations and those implemented after agreements have been signed. It argues that Botswana, Ethiopia and Rwanda have been more successful than the other five cases in levering negotiating capital from the economic, political, ideological and institutional conditions under which negotiations occur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes and explains the impact of the donor-driven Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) and the aid modalities surrounding it in Ghana. It focuses on the period in which the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government was in power from 2001 until 2008, but places this within the broader context of aid dependence in Ghana since the 1980s. It is argued that the PRSP documents produced by the government had little impact on implementing policy actions, but rather their function was to secure debt relief and the continuation of foreign aid from official donors. The article examines what was actually implemented during the NPP government and the factors that influenced those actions. More generally it highlights the constraints Ghanaian governments have faced in pursuing economic transformation within contemporary domestic and international contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the process of formulating Ghana's Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS) Paper from the perspective of reforming the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the two institutions which launched the PRS Initiative in the context of longstanding criticisms of their structural adjustment programs, and from the perspective of understanding policymaking in highly indebted, aid-dependent African countries.