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The Institutional Economics of Foreign Aid
Journal of Development Economics 72 (2003) 413 – 423 www.elsevier.com/locate/econbase
Book reviews The Institutional Economics of Foreign Aid Bertin Martins with Uwe Mummert, Peter Murrell and Paul Seabright, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN: 0521 808189 (hardback), £40.00 (US$60.00) This very interesting book deals with the discussion about the effectiveness of foreign aid and analyzes how the results of foreign aid can be improved. More specifically, this book uses the framework of the principal-agent model to analyze incentive problems that may occur in foreign aid delivery. Since the publication of Assessing Aid by the World Bank (1988), a renewed interest on aid policies has emerged and a lively debate now takes place. The debate focuses primarily on the necessary conditions for aid effectiveness. The main hypothesis of Assessing Aid is that aid does help to increase growth, but only in countries with sound economic management, or ‘good’ governance. A direct implication of this hypothesis is that Assessing Aid suggests that the responsibility for the effectiveness of aid lies primarily with the recipient countries. In contrast, The Institutional Economics of Foreign Aid claims that the results of aid are not solely a function of recipient country policies. Rather, by focusing on the incentives within the entire chain of the aid delivery process, the book argues that an important part of the responsibility for the fact that foreign aid has often not achieved its intended goals lies with the aid donors and their intermediaries. This may be an obvious conclusion, but still it is highly important, especially in view of the current over-emphasis on recipient behavior to explain aid performance. By pointing to the various agency problems that may arise throughout the chain of the aid delivery process, the book also clearly shows that improving aid performance is far from simple. Agency theory forms the theoretical background for the studies presented in the book. Basically, agency theory assumes that the principal tries to devise contractual arrangements with one or more agents in such a way that it best serves the objectives of the principal. A central issue in agency theory is that a principal needs to delegate part of its work to an agent. However, due to asymmetric information, the agent may work in her own interests and behave sub-optimally from the principal’s point of view. The lack of full information may lead to the well-known problems of adverse selection and moral hazard. Principal-agent theory is most useful for analyzing the donor – recipient relationships in conditionality contracts. This becomes more apparent because of a broken feedback loop between the beneficiaries of aid and those who pay for the aid, the taxpayers in the donor country. The broken feedback loop introduces information problems and several conflicts between the different players in the process of aid donations. This book is not the first study in which agency theory is used to explain aid performance. Rather, several authors
414
Book reviews
(see, for instance, Killick, 1998, Aid and the Political Economy of Policy Change. London: Routledge) have used agency theory to analyze conditionality problems. The Institutional Economics of Foreign Aid diverges from other applications of agency theory to aid policies in that it tries to go down from a macro-level conditionality study to a micro analysis of the informational and incentive problems that may occur within the entire aid delivery process from the donor to the recipient. The book consists of six chapters. The initial chapter, by Bertin Martens, is a survey of the material and topics discussed at greater length in the remainder of the volume. In chapter 6, a summing up is given and some policy conclusions are drawn. The core of the book consists of chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5, in which the various channels of the aid delivery process are analyzed individually. Chapter 2, by Paul Seabright, focuses on the behavior of aid donors. He examines the implications of multiple principals and objectives. Moreover, he deals with possible problems due to the fact that aid agencies suffer from the problem that the beneficiaries of foreign aid are separated from those who provide the funds. Seabright starts by surveying the relevant principal-agent literature for aid policies. He deals with the consequences of having multiple principals, as is the case with aid donors like the World Bank (many shareholders) and the European Union (15 member states). Next, he develops a two-period, multi-task principal agent model with a single risk-neutral principal and a pool of risk-neutral agents. The model sheds light on the difficulties arising when a principal has multiple tasks, as is often the case in the formulation of aid policies. Here, problems might occur if one of the tasks is easier to monitor, and if the performance of one of the tasks affects the performance of another. Basically, the model shows what the benefits and costs are due to specialization. The main policy implications of the model are that in case skills needed to undertake different tasks are correlated, there will be a bundling of tasks, inevitably leading to a misallocation of talents. The outcome probably results in a bias to monitor inputs that are easy to monitor and a bias to focus on routine tasks. With regard to aid policies, this would probably provide an incentive to focus on ensuring that budgets are spent, rather than focusing on whether they are spent well. A separation of tasks would avoid this misallocation of talents. However, this will not happen due to the high opportunity costs of foregone gains from exploiting the links between the talents. In chapter 3, Peter Murrell develops a very rich principal-agent model in order to analyze the incentive problems which arise if an aid donor hires an intermediate contractor to implement institutional reforms in a recipient country. The contractor needs to develop a law that is as close as possible to Western standards. However, the donor principal can only observe de jure law, i.e. the formal statutes on the books. This allows room for moral hazard in project implementation. Since institutions are embedded in the socio-economic environment, changes in the law probably make the law more effective in the recipient country. During the implementation stage, the contractor is under pressure to change de facto law. Moreover, in the implementation stage, a recipient agent needs to devote local help to implement the institutional change. The model describes a game between the contractor and the recipient agent who need to decide on the level of technical assistance and local help, respectively. The desired outcome of the EU will result if control over project decisions is divided between the contractor and the recipient agent. However, if the
Book reviews
415
recipient agent has full bargaining power, the resulting equilibrium will be furthest away from the EU-desired outcome. To further value the different possible equilibria, Murrell distinguishes between the case where the recipient agent acts on behalf of an interest group and the case where the recipient agent and principal have the same interests and behave in accordance with social welfare objectives in the recipient country. In the ‘embedded’ case, the benefits of the reforms depend on how well the intended reforms match with welfare preferences in the recipient country. In the interest group case, the benefits of law implementation for the recipient agent do not reflect the social benefits. In the latter case, the donor principal should try to achieve an outcome that is as close as possible to the EUdesired outcome since the outcome, which is most in the interest of the recipient agent, will not reflect recipient country social welfare, but only an optimal outcome for some interest groups. If there is no bargaining between the contractor and the recipient agent, the optimal outcome will be achieved if control over project decisions is divided between the two. Alternatively, if bargaining cannot be avoided, the optimal policy for the donor is to give the contractor full control over project implementation. In the ‘embedded’ case, the welfare of the recipient country might have an important effect on the preferences of the donor. In such a case, it may be optimal to give the recipient more control over project implementation. In chapter 4, Uwe Mummert analyzes in detail the process of implementing policy changes after some institutional reforms have been formally accepted. The chapter focuses on problems that may arise when the institutional reforms are not embedded in the socio-economic environment. The chapter contains two parts. First, a principal-agent model dealing with a recipient government, a public agent and a citizen is presented. The recipient government delegates the implementation of an institutional change to the public agent who supervises compliance. The citizen should comply with the new institution. However, the citizen may pay the agent to avoid some institutional reforms. So, the model allows for bribing. One of the most important implications of the model is that it shows that existing social networks may impede effective institutional reforms. In order to make institutional reforms more effective, it may be necessary to hire public agents that do not have close contacts with the existing social networks. In the second part of the chapter, the author presents descriptive analyses of possible sources of conflict that may arise when institutional reforms have to be implemented. The analysis deals explicitly with conflicts between formal laws and informal social norms. Mummert argues that the possibility of these conflicts depends primarily on how formal laws and social norms are framed. Laws and social norms can be framed in a prescriptive way (‘thou should do’) or in a proscriptive way (‘thou should not do’). The probability of conflicts depends on how prescriptive the social norms or formal laws are. If laws are more prescriptively framed, the likelihood of conflicts with the social norms will increase. Mummert argues that the institutional core of market economies (exchange and competition), and the corresponding substantive market laws, is proscriptively framed so that the probability of conflicts is low. However, he also states that formal laws supplementing the substantive market laws are much more proscriptively framed, so that conflicts with social norms may easily occur. In addition, Mummert emphasizes that the possibility of conflicts depends very much on the structure of the recipient society. If the society is highly fragmented, the possibility of conflicts between formal
416
Book reviews
laws and social norms will be higher and implementing institutional reforms will be more difficult. In chapter 5, Bertin Martins deals with the role of evaluation in foreign aid programs. He develops a principal-agent model in order to analyze the behavior of politicians, commercial service suppliers and aid agencies. The politicians compete for votes by allocating taxes across different spending categories, including aid, and by disclosing information about tax allocations and performance targets to the taxpayers. Service suppliers do the implementation of the program, so that politicians only indirectly affect the performance of the aid program through evaluations, which are done by aid agencies. Martins emphasizes that aid programs suffer from a broken feedback loop, in the sense that foreign beneficiaries live outside of the country whose taxpayers pay for the aid and the donor principals who decide on it. Moreover, (local) aid suppliers have other interests for increasing aid than taxpayers. Taxpayers like aid for reasons of wealth distribution while aid suppliers are simply seeking business opportunities. Since aid suppliers have an information advantage over taxpayers, the role of evaluations becomes very important in order to provide taxpayers with the correct information about the effectiveness of the aid. However, this evaluation is done by aid agencies who themselves are subject to political manipulation. For instance, the politicians may collude with the aid agency and induce the aid agency to reduce the accuracy of the evaluations. This, of course, will influence aid performance. Hence, as is argued several times in the book, aid performance is not only determined by recipient policies, but also by the domestic policy issues in the donor country. The main weakness of the book is that there is an almost complete lack of empirical analyses. It tries to clarify the main issues as much as possible by practical examples, but it remains essentially theoretical. For this reason, the relevance of the statements presented in the book are somewhat unclear, which the authors realize. Nevertheless, the strong focus on theory implies that much more empirical work is needed before any of the results presented in the book can form a basis for implementing aid policies. Another criticism is that in some chapters, it is difficult to get a grip on the main points that the author wants to make. In my view, some of the chapters would have been much clearer and crispier if a sharper focus has been chosen. Chapter 2, for instance, includes an overly long introduction and survey of the literature, which is only loosely related to the new model that is subsequently developed. It is unfortunate that the model is only partially presented; for technical details and proofs, the reader is referred to an (unpublished) background paper, which makes it difficult to judge the theoretical analysis. Another criticism I have is that while the book is very good in analyzing the problems that might come up in the aid delivery process, it gives little guidance to aid donors on how to avoid these problems. This is partly a result of the focus on theory. However, even in the context of the principal-agent models developed by the various authors, much more could have been done to shed light on how to solve the many problems referred to in the book. This could have been done, for instance, by much more clearly spelling out (or deriving) the conditions under which incentive-compatible contracts exist that avoid the problems the authors are focusing on. A final comment I have is that, given the importance of the now almost universally accepted view (at the least within policy circles) that aid works if recipient policies are
Book reviews
417
good, it is unfortunate that the authors have not tried to clearly elaborate on this issue. It seems as if they (partly) disagree with the Assessing Aid view, although this remains unclear to me. I would have welcomed a concluding chapter in which the differences in the views expounded by the authors of this book and the World Bank’s view, as expressed in Assessing Aid, had been compared, and that the policy implications of these differences had have been clearly spelled out. That being said, I can conclude by stating that this is an excellent book, which certainly has advanced my understanding of the key issues influencing aid performance. Since we still know so little about how exactly aid works, more theory is needed, especially in view of the current overload of aid-growth types of regressions which are only loosely rooted in theory. This book is therefore a valuable addition to the aid literature, and a must-read for everybody interested in the theory and practice of aid policies.
Robert Lensink Faculty of Economics, University of Groningen, PO Box 800, Groningen 9700, The Netherlands E-mail address: [email protected] Tel.: +31-50-363-3712 6 March 2003 doi:10.1016/S0304-3878(03)00041-5
From Crisis to Growth in Africa? By Mats Lundahl (ed.), London: Routledge Press, 2001, pp. 304. Price: £60 These papers were originally presented at a conference at the Stockholm School of Economics in May 1999. The general conclusion to the book’s title question is no: ‘‘It is not possible to contend that Africa has taken the step from crisis to growth, at least not to sustained growth,’’ summarizes the editor (p. 19). This conclusion is based on the volume’s 13 country case studies of reform and growth in sub-Saharan Africa. The countries are divided into three categories: ‘‘war-stricken economies’’ (Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia, and Eritrea); ‘‘reform strugglers’’ (Kenya, Cape Verde, Zambia, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe); and ‘‘growth seekers’’ (Uganda, South Africa, and Lesotho). The individual chapters that describe these cases are generally well written, though some are more rigorous in their analytical approach than others. Yet, there are two levels on which one must simultaneously evaluate an edited volume such as this—in a sense, the micro and macro levels. On the ‘‘micro’’ level of the individual chapters, the volume is more than satisfactory; yet, on the ‘‘macro’’ level, the volume’s structure and conclusions may be questioned. One issue that arises in considering the volume as a whole is the choice of countries for inclusion as case studies. Given the book’s broad title and goal (as well as its space limitations), one might question the editor’s decision to allocate so large a portion of its
Book reviews The Institutional Economics of Foreign Aid Bertin Martins with Uwe Mummert, Peter Murrell and Paul Seabright, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN: 0521 808189 (hardback), £40.00 (US$60.00) This very interesting book deals with the discussion about the effectiveness of foreign aid and analyzes how the results of foreign aid can be improved. More specifically, this book uses the framework of the principal-agent model to analyze incentive problems that may occur in foreign aid delivery. Since the publication of Assessing Aid by the World Bank (1988), a renewed interest on aid policies has emerged and a lively debate now takes place. The debate focuses primarily on the necessary conditions for aid effectiveness. The main hypothesis of Assessing Aid is that aid does help to increase growth, but only in countries with sound economic management, or ‘good’ governance. A direct implication of this hypothesis is that Assessing Aid suggests that the responsibility for the effectiveness of aid lies primarily with the recipient countries. In contrast, The Institutional Economics of Foreign Aid claims that the results of aid are not solely a function of recipient country policies. Rather, by focusing on the incentives within the entire chain of the aid delivery process, the book argues that an important part of the responsibility for the fact that foreign aid has often not achieved its intended goals lies with the aid donors and their intermediaries. This may be an obvious conclusion, but still it is highly important, especially in view of the current over-emphasis on recipient behavior to explain aid performance. By pointing to the various agency problems that may arise throughout the chain of the aid delivery process, the book also clearly shows that improving aid performance is far from simple. Agency theory forms the theoretical background for the studies presented in the book. Basically, agency theory assumes that the principal tries to devise contractual arrangements with one or more agents in such a way that it best serves the objectives of the principal. A central issue in agency theory is that a principal needs to delegate part of its work to an agent. However, due to asymmetric information, the agent may work in her own interests and behave sub-optimally from the principal’s point of view. The lack of full information may lead to the well-known problems of adverse selection and moral hazard. Principal-agent theory is most useful for analyzing the donor – recipient relationships in conditionality contracts. This becomes more apparent because of a broken feedback loop between the beneficiaries of aid and those who pay for the aid, the taxpayers in the donor country. The broken feedback loop introduces information problems and several conflicts between the different players in the process of aid donations. This book is not the first study in which agency theory is used to explain aid performance. Rather, several authors
414
Book reviews
(see, for instance, Killick, 1998, Aid and the Political Economy of Policy Change. London: Routledge) have used agency theory to analyze conditionality problems. The Institutional Economics of Foreign Aid diverges from other applications of agency theory to aid policies in that it tries to go down from a macro-level conditionality study to a micro analysis of the informational and incentive problems that may occur within the entire aid delivery process from the donor to the recipient. The book consists of six chapters. The initial chapter, by Bertin Martens, is a survey of the material and topics discussed at greater length in the remainder of the volume. In chapter 6, a summing up is given and some policy conclusions are drawn. The core of the book consists of chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5, in which the various channels of the aid delivery process are analyzed individually. Chapter 2, by Paul Seabright, focuses on the behavior of aid donors. He examines the implications of multiple principals and objectives. Moreover, he deals with possible problems due to the fact that aid agencies suffer from the problem that the beneficiaries of foreign aid are separated from those who provide the funds. Seabright starts by surveying the relevant principal-agent literature for aid policies. He deals with the consequences of having multiple principals, as is the case with aid donors like the World Bank (many shareholders) and the European Union (15 member states). Next, he develops a two-period, multi-task principal agent model with a single risk-neutral principal and a pool of risk-neutral agents. The model sheds light on the difficulties arising when a principal has multiple tasks, as is often the case in the formulation of aid policies. Here, problems might occur if one of the tasks is easier to monitor, and if the performance of one of the tasks affects the performance of another. Basically, the model shows what the benefits and costs are due to specialization. The main policy implications of the model are that in case skills needed to undertake different tasks are correlated, there will be a bundling of tasks, inevitably leading to a misallocation of talents. The outcome probably results in a bias to monitor inputs that are easy to monitor and a bias to focus on routine tasks. With regard to aid policies, this would probably provide an incentive to focus on ensuring that budgets are spent, rather than focusing on whether they are spent well. A separation of tasks would avoid this misallocation of talents. However, this will not happen due to the high opportunity costs of foregone gains from exploiting the links between the talents. In chapter 3, Peter Murrell develops a very rich principal-agent model in order to analyze the incentive problems which arise if an aid donor hires an intermediate contractor to implement institutional reforms in a recipient country. The contractor needs to develop a law that is as close as possible to Western standards. However, the donor principal can only observe de jure law, i.e. the formal statutes on the books. This allows room for moral hazard in project implementation. Since institutions are embedded in the socio-economic environment, changes in the law probably make the law more effective in the recipient country. During the implementation stage, the contractor is under pressure to change de facto law. Moreover, in the implementation stage, a recipient agent needs to devote local help to implement the institutional change. The model describes a game between the contractor and the recipient agent who need to decide on the level of technical assistance and local help, respectively. The desired outcome of the EU will result if control over project decisions is divided between the contractor and the recipient agent. However, if the
Book reviews
415
recipient agent has full bargaining power, the resulting equilibrium will be furthest away from the EU-desired outcome. To further value the different possible equilibria, Murrell distinguishes between the case where the recipient agent acts on behalf of an interest group and the case where the recipient agent and principal have the same interests and behave in accordance with social welfare objectives in the recipient country. In the ‘embedded’ case, the benefits of the reforms depend on how well the intended reforms match with welfare preferences in the recipient country. In the interest group case, the benefits of law implementation for the recipient agent do not reflect the social benefits. In the latter case, the donor principal should try to achieve an outcome that is as close as possible to the EUdesired outcome since the outcome, which is most in the interest of the recipient agent, will not reflect recipient country social welfare, but only an optimal outcome for some interest groups. If there is no bargaining between the contractor and the recipient agent, the optimal outcome will be achieved if control over project decisions is divided between the two. Alternatively, if bargaining cannot be avoided, the optimal policy for the donor is to give the contractor full control over project implementation. In the ‘embedded’ case, the welfare of the recipient country might have an important effect on the preferences of the donor. In such a case, it may be optimal to give the recipient more control over project implementation. In chapter 4, Uwe Mummert analyzes in detail the process of implementing policy changes after some institutional reforms have been formally accepted. The chapter focuses on problems that may arise when the institutional reforms are not embedded in the socio-economic environment. The chapter contains two parts. First, a principal-agent model dealing with a recipient government, a public agent and a citizen is presented. The recipient government delegates the implementation of an institutional change to the public agent who supervises compliance. The citizen should comply with the new institution. However, the citizen may pay the agent to avoid some institutional reforms. So, the model allows for bribing. One of the most important implications of the model is that it shows that existing social networks may impede effective institutional reforms. In order to make institutional reforms more effective, it may be necessary to hire public agents that do not have close contacts with the existing social networks. In the second part of the chapter, the author presents descriptive analyses of possible sources of conflict that may arise when institutional reforms have to be implemented. The analysis deals explicitly with conflicts between formal laws and informal social norms. Mummert argues that the possibility of these conflicts depends primarily on how formal laws and social norms are framed. Laws and social norms can be framed in a prescriptive way (‘thou should do’) or in a proscriptive way (‘thou should not do’). The probability of conflicts depends on how prescriptive the social norms or formal laws are. If laws are more prescriptively framed, the likelihood of conflicts with the social norms will increase. Mummert argues that the institutional core of market economies (exchange and competition), and the corresponding substantive market laws, is proscriptively framed so that the probability of conflicts is low. However, he also states that formal laws supplementing the substantive market laws are much more proscriptively framed, so that conflicts with social norms may easily occur. In addition, Mummert emphasizes that the possibility of conflicts depends very much on the structure of the recipient society. If the society is highly fragmented, the possibility of conflicts between formal
416
Book reviews
laws and social norms will be higher and implementing institutional reforms will be more difficult. In chapter 5, Bertin Martins deals with the role of evaluation in foreign aid programs. He develops a principal-agent model in order to analyze the behavior of politicians, commercial service suppliers and aid agencies. The politicians compete for votes by allocating taxes across different spending categories, including aid, and by disclosing information about tax allocations and performance targets to the taxpayers. Service suppliers do the implementation of the program, so that politicians only indirectly affect the performance of the aid program through evaluations, which are done by aid agencies. Martins emphasizes that aid programs suffer from a broken feedback loop, in the sense that foreign beneficiaries live outside of the country whose taxpayers pay for the aid and the donor principals who decide on it. Moreover, (local) aid suppliers have other interests for increasing aid than taxpayers. Taxpayers like aid for reasons of wealth distribution while aid suppliers are simply seeking business opportunities. Since aid suppliers have an information advantage over taxpayers, the role of evaluations becomes very important in order to provide taxpayers with the correct information about the effectiveness of the aid. However, this evaluation is done by aid agencies who themselves are subject to political manipulation. For instance, the politicians may collude with the aid agency and induce the aid agency to reduce the accuracy of the evaluations. This, of course, will influence aid performance. Hence, as is argued several times in the book, aid performance is not only determined by recipient policies, but also by the domestic policy issues in the donor country. The main weakness of the book is that there is an almost complete lack of empirical analyses. It tries to clarify the main issues as much as possible by practical examples, but it remains essentially theoretical. For this reason, the relevance of the statements presented in the book are somewhat unclear, which the authors realize. Nevertheless, the strong focus on theory implies that much more empirical work is needed before any of the results presented in the book can form a basis for implementing aid policies. Another criticism is that in some chapters, it is difficult to get a grip on the main points that the author wants to make. In my view, some of the chapters would have been much clearer and crispier if a sharper focus has been chosen. Chapter 2, for instance, includes an overly long introduction and survey of the literature, which is only loosely related to the new model that is subsequently developed. It is unfortunate that the model is only partially presented; for technical details and proofs, the reader is referred to an (unpublished) background paper, which makes it difficult to judge the theoretical analysis. Another criticism I have is that while the book is very good in analyzing the problems that might come up in the aid delivery process, it gives little guidance to aid donors on how to avoid these problems. This is partly a result of the focus on theory. However, even in the context of the principal-agent models developed by the various authors, much more could have been done to shed light on how to solve the many problems referred to in the book. This could have been done, for instance, by much more clearly spelling out (or deriving) the conditions under which incentive-compatible contracts exist that avoid the problems the authors are focusing on. A final comment I have is that, given the importance of the now almost universally accepted view (at the least within policy circles) that aid works if recipient policies are
Book reviews
417
good, it is unfortunate that the authors have not tried to clearly elaborate on this issue. It seems as if they (partly) disagree with the Assessing Aid view, although this remains unclear to me. I would have welcomed a concluding chapter in which the differences in the views expounded by the authors of this book and the World Bank’s view, as expressed in Assessing Aid, had been compared, and that the policy implications of these differences had have been clearly spelled out. That being said, I can conclude by stating that this is an excellent book, which certainly has advanced my understanding of the key issues influencing aid performance. Since we still know so little about how exactly aid works, more theory is needed, especially in view of the current overload of aid-growth types of regressions which are only loosely rooted in theory. This book is therefore a valuable addition to the aid literature, and a must-read for everybody interested in the theory and practice of aid policies.
Robert Lensink Faculty of Economics, University of Groningen, PO Box 800, Groningen 9700, The Netherlands E-mail address: [email protected] Tel.: +31-50-363-3712 6 March 2003 doi:10.1016/S0304-3878(03)00041-5
From Crisis to Growth in Africa? By Mats Lundahl (ed.), London: Routledge Press, 2001, pp. 304. Price: £60 These papers were originally presented at a conference at the Stockholm School of Economics in May 1999. The general conclusion to the book’s title question is no: ‘‘It is not possible to contend that Africa has taken the step from crisis to growth, at least not to sustained growth,’’ summarizes the editor (p. 19). This conclusion is based on the volume’s 13 country case studies of reform and growth in sub-Saharan Africa. The countries are divided into three categories: ‘‘war-stricken economies’’ (Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia, and Eritrea); ‘‘reform strugglers’’ (Kenya, Cape Verde, Zambia, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe); and ‘‘growth seekers’’ (Uganda, South Africa, and Lesotho). The individual chapters that describe these cases are generally well written, though some are more rigorous in their analytical approach than others. Yet, there are two levels on which one must simultaneously evaluate an edited volume such as this—in a sense, the micro and macro levels. On the ‘‘micro’’ level of the individual chapters, the volume is more than satisfactory; yet, on the ‘‘macro’’ level, the volume’s structure and conclusions may be questioned. One issue that arises in considering the volume as a whole is the choice of countries for inclusion as case studies. Given the book’s broad title and goal (as well as its space limitations), one might question the editor’s decision to allocate so large a portion of its