How do industrialists in developing countries respond to globalization and trade liberalization? It is almost a truism that businesspeople are motivated by profits. Thus, it seems logical that exporters would support trade liberalization, which increases access to opportunities and inputs on global markets, and domestically oriented producers would resist efforts to dismantle protectionism, to which many manufacturers in the developing world owe their very existence. What, then, explains different patterns of business collective action in different countries?

This book has developed a model of business responses to global economic integration and tested it through a comparative analysis of business politics in Tunisia and Morocco, where investors in the same industrial sectors reacted very differently to economic opening. Tunisia and Morocco had parallel episodes of economic liberalization, are both highly dependent on trade with the EU, and have comparable linkages to the global economy and production profiles. In response to trade liberalization and global economic changes in the 1990s, Tunisian industrialists avoided collective lobbying efforts, focusing instead on firm-based upgrading or exit strategies, while a handful of larger industrialists conveyed policy preferences to state officials through informal channels. Moroccan producers, however, organized vigorous collective lobbying campaigns through producer associations and increasingly relied on public channels such as the media to convey policy interests.

On the surface, distinct Tunisian and Moroccan business responses defy a materialist logic.