Trading Down: Africa, Value Chains, And The Global Economy
ISBN: 9781592133697
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Temple University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Africa -- Economic conditions -- 1960–; Africa -- Economic policy; Globalization;

Africa's role in the global economy is evolving as a result of new corporate strategies, changing trade regulations, and innovative ways of overseeing the globalized production and distribution of goods both within Africa and internationally. African participants in the global economy, now faced with demands for higher levels of performance and quality, have generated occasional successes but also many failures. Peter Gibbon and Stefano Ponte describe the central processes that are integrating some African firms into the global economy while at the same time marginalizing others. They show the effects of these processes on African countries, and the farms and firms within them. The authors use an innovative combination of global value chain analysis--which links production, trade, and consumption--and convention theory, an approach to understanding the conduct of business. In doing so, Gibbon and Ponte present a timely overview of the economic challenges that lay ahead in Africa, and point to ways to best address them.

Peter Gibbon is a Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. Amongst his authored works is A Blighted Harvest: The World Bank and African Agriculture in the 1980s. He has also edited numerous books.
Stefano Ponte is a Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. He is the author of Farmers and Markets in Tanzania: How Market Reforms Affect Rural Livelihoods in Africa and co-author (with Benoit Daviron) of The Coffee Paradox: Global Markets, Commodity Trade and the Elusive Promise of Development.

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