Regional disparity in sub-Saharan Africa : structural readjustment of uneven development / Assefa Mehretu

Includes bibliographical references.

1. The Nature of the African Development -- 2. Structural Hegemony in the Economic Geography of Sub-Saharan Africa -- 3. Structural Hegemony and Ecological Constraints in Sub-Saharan Africa -- 4. Fundamentals of Structural Hegemony: Theoretical Issues for Spatial Readjustment -- 5. Empirical Regularities of Structural Hegemony: The Economic Geography of the Postcolonial State in Sub-Saharan Africa -- 6. Approaches to Structural Readjustment and Development Planning.

This is an outcome of research on African development from the standpoint i economic geography which I have been undertaking over the last four years. The initial impetus for the research was a social science grant from the Rockefeller Foundation which enabled me to write most of the preliminary draft of the book during a sabbatical in 1934/85 which I spent at the University of Zimbabwe as Visiting Professor of Geography. A good deal of the latter part of the book was written in September of 1985 at the Rockefeller Foundation Study and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy, where I spent three weeks as a member of the Reflections on Development Fellows of the Foundation from Africa and Asia. My principal objective in this work is to highlight and reflect on the principal socio spatial constraints to development in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) that have been largely ignored by development research and planning. The work especially tries to draw attention to postcolonial anti-development biases in spatial form and process whose combined impact on patterns of production and distribution I have referred to as structural hegemony. I have used structural hegemony as a systemic construct to encompass social and spatial factors of control and domination that collectively militate against equity in political participation, access to opportunities for development, and free enterprise in competitive markets. My use of the term structural hegemony is not limited to characterize postcolonial biases and distortions connected with the imperfections of the neoclassical framework. It is also intended to include all' non-democratic forms of regimentation, especially those that emanate from totalitarian regimes in so-called socialist states in Sub-Saharan Africa. The worsening spatial polarity in levels of living between primate cities and rural hinterlands in Sub-Saharan Africa is attributed to structural hegemony exercised by typical core characteristics in postcolonial states to the detriment of the majority in the countryside. I have argued that once the effect of distance decay has been accounted for, the remaining unevenness in space of benefits from development in Sub-Saharan nations is more a function of structural hegemony than it is of competitive inequality in access to the means of production.