Orthodox approaches to development view the market as a key institution for driving economic transformation and for fostering innovation and competitiveness. The working of markets alone, however, does not always lead to improved outcomes such as increase in productivity or production efficiency in the context of smallholders. The role of non-market institutions, therefore, remains important. This paper examines the role of intermediary coordination in addressing constraints to efficiency and productivity of smallholder sugarcane producers in Tanzania. It also makes a contrastive analysis of a different organisational arrangement for smallholder sugarcane producers in Malawi. The key proposition is that while intermediary organisations of cane outgrowers in Tanzania have played a significant role in promoting effective market linkage, an increase in productivity required for competitiveness is limited by the lack of effective horizontal coordination.
Related Articles
Does Citizen’s Trust in Government Increase Willingness to Pay Taxes in Tanzania?
A Case Study of Mtwara, Lindi and Dar es Salaam Regions This paper examines the citizen’s trust in government and their willingness to pay taxes to improve public goods and services in Tanzania. We use a logit model to estimate the effect of government trust on willingness to pay taxes on improved public goods/services. Chi-square […]
Policy implementation under stress
Central-local government relations in property tax administration in Tanzania Inter-organisational cooperation in revenue collection has received limited attention in the tax administration literature. Recent experiences from Tanzania offer a unique opportunity to examine opportunities and challenges facing such cooperation between central and local government agencies in a developing country context. The administration of property taxes […]
Alternatives to local content requirements in resource-rich countries
This paper discusses whether and to what extent resource-rich developing countries should introduce local content policies, i.e. requirements to include local inputs in petroleum extraction activities of multinational corporations. We argue that local content needs to be seen as a public expenditure question, since local content requirements increase multinational costs, and hence reduce the taxes […]
Growth, Employment, Poverty and Inequality in Tanzania
This paper shows that in Tanzania, economic growth contributes to job creation and employment opportunities, however, it does very little to curb income inequality. Using official data from various local sources compiled by the National Bureau of Statistics…