Africa's Overgrown State Reconsidered: Bureaucracy and Economic Growth

Abstract

How close is the link between outsized states and economic stagnation in Africa? This article shows that African public bureaucracies are not as large as often portrayed, that they have been getting smaller, and that reducing their size alone has not been a prescription for economic revival. To the contrary, the countries with higher levels of public employment, such as Botswana and Mauritius, are apt to have the better economic records. These findings suggest that a superabundance of public personnel is not in itself?, major impediment to growth in Africa. Too much attention has been paid to quantitative or “first-generation” bureaucratic problems, and too little attention has been given the “second-generation” issues of bureaucratic quality.