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Industrialisation in West Africa—the Need for Sub-Regional Groupings within an Integrated Economic Community
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2008
Extract
In the years that have elapsed since the ending of colonial rule, the newly independent states of Africa have been understandably preoccupied with a general resolve to achieve rapid and sustained economic growth. Certain countries have attached especial importance to investment in agriculture, others have devoted high proportions of their resources to material infrastructure, to the exploitation of minerals, or to education and training; whatever the immediate policy pursued, however, there has been general unanimity that at the far end of the development process each African state hopes to possess a growing number of economically viable manufacturing industries.1 Apart from the material benefits that industrialisation can bring there is a general belief, as Pierre Moussa has put it, that ‘the factory chimney has mythical value; it expresses a people's success on earth, their ability to cope with the modern world’.2
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References
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Page 378 note 1 This view is confirmed in a recent analysis presented to the fifth inter-regional seminar on development planning at Bangkok, September 1969, by C. Aquereburu: ‘Multi-national Regional Planning as a Strategy of Development in the Second Development Decade—with special reference to Africa’ (U.N.E.S.C.O., Paris, 1969), ISDP. 5/A/R/3a, mimeo.
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Page 380 note 1 Apart from the omission of Chad, now in U.D.E.A.C., and of Portuguese Guinée, this list corresponds closely to that suggested in 1963 in the preliminary report of the West African Industrial Co-ordination Mission, distributed by E.C.A. as document E/CN 14/INR/25. There is also some discussion of ‘immediate natural groupings’ by Ewing, A. F. in his Industry in Africa (London, 1968), p. 92,Google Scholar with a similar recognition of the need to associate Ghana with the states of the Conseil d'entente, i.e. Côte d'Ivoire, Haute Volta, Niger, Dahomey, and Togo.
Page 381 note 1 On the basis of shared currency and membership of the Conseil d'eatente, it might be considered wiser to put Niger and Dahomey in the Central Economic Union; there is reason to believe, however, that apart from tribal affinities both of these small states have distinct leanings towards closer association with their large Nigerian neighbour. A more critical issue is whether the Ivory Coast is yet ready to abandon her cosy and profitable relationship with France in order to collaborate with other African states; Berg, Elliot J., ‘The Economic Basis of Political Choice in French West Africa’, in The American Political Science Review (Menasha), LXIV, 1960, p. 405.Google Scholar In fact it may not be necessary to abandon the major features of the former, in order to enjoy the latter.
Page 382 note 1 Berg, loc. cit. p. 401.
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