“While mindful of the potentially positive consequences of globalization for Africa, this paper posits that conscious policies are required to ensure that trade openness and increased private capital inflows lead to enhanced and sustained growth. Despite the pressures from external sources of essential finance and external policemen enforcing new global rules, African economic policy makers still have important options as they address the future of their countries’ relationships with the world.They need not mindlessly submit to the forces of
globalization by total abandonment of any role in the mediation of national links to the world economy. In Section 2, a review is given of the recent evolution of the world’s trade and financial regimes from a primarily African perspective. In Section 3, a perspective is offered on the role of external sector policies—of various kinds—in African development. Section 4 provides a review of the African experience in the areas of trade and capital account policies in the context of the analytical framework of Section 3. This sets the stage for the analysis in Section 5, which explores the interactions between the WTO and the two Bretton Woods’ institutions in the areas of trade and capital account policies, and draws potential implications for Africa’s future development. This section attempts to set out some modalities for collaboration between the WTO, IMF and the World Bank hat, in our view, could provide better multilateral institutional support for African development and calls attention to the real problems in achieving such useful cooperation/coordination between the three institutions. Section 6 concludes.”
