A Back Door to Globalisation? Structural Adjustment, Globalisation & Transborder Trade in West Africa

By K. Meagher. 2003

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Neo-liberal economic reforms were widely expected to rein in Africa's unofficial transborder trade through liberalisation and closer integration into the global economy. Instead of disappearing in the face of structural adjustment and globalisation, however, West African transborder trading systems have been restructured and globalised. This article analyses how the West African experience of economic restructuring has led to an expansion and deepening of unofficial trade, as well as the globalisation of its activities. A clear understanding of this process has been blurred by the ideological manipulation of perspectives on informal economic activity by proponents of the neo-liberal reforms. By means of a deconstruction of populist analyses and more recent narratives of criminalisation, this article traces the contemporary evolution of transborder trade. The conclusion reached is that, while transborder trading structures represent important institutional resources for economic development, they are structurally incapable of integrating West Africa into the global economy in the absence of an appropriate regulatory framework.

Subfields: Anthropology, Development, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/86ae38798e4fbc88837dc6654e3e3e50ddf5e45e

How researchers see this paper

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In Anthropology

1. M. Oteng‐Ababio
2. R. Grant
3. K. Meagher

In Development

1. M. Oteng‐Ababio
2. R. Grant
3. K. Meagher

In Political Science and International Relations

1. M. Oteng‐Ababio
2. R. Grant
3. K. Meagher

Citations in the corpus

• Mapping the Invisible and Real "African" Economy: Urban E-Waste Circuitry (2012, background): “Liberalization policies created a general environment of disarray throughout the official economy, which in turn contributed greatly to the growth of transborder trading opportunities (Meagher, 2003).”
• Social capital or analytical liability? Social networks and African informal economies (2005, background): “However, as research has shown, these 27 networks, and the commercial institutions embedded in them, have persisted into the present, forming a critical infrastructure for the rapid development of informal economies since the 1970s (Grégoire 1992, Lambert 1989, Meagher 2003).”