A market economy described as an economy based on the power of division of labor in which the prices of goods and services are determined in a free price system set by supply and demand has been with Africa since A.D. 1000. Merchants during this period practiced both internal and external trades. Chiefs and kings did not “intervene in pricing” as Ludwig von Mises explains free market economy.
De Soto assertion that people in the West trust each other may have the narrow view. Free market economy was practices by Africans by the fourth century A.D with Europe. Gradual commercial contacts were made crossing the desert to transact economic activities with southern Europe. The whole system depended on mutual trust which African merchants did not betray. An illustration is the famous story of how when a North African merchant died in the empire of Mali, his goods were kept intact until his relatives could claim them.
The break away from this was by Nationalist leaders who embraced superiority of the single party state and bureaucracy as the main ideals of state making for purposes of consolidation. In economic terms, however, the government postured itself as a benevolent amalgamation of political and economic authority seeking to provide for the needs of ‘marginalized masses’. Thus, without embracing communist ideologies, African nationalists turned advocates of the Stalinist- Marxist philosophy that the state should determine, inter alia, "allocation of resources, distribution of income and consumption, levels of saving and investment, and relative prices of goods and services. But this did not last as the peoples of Africa threw away such an alien policy with coup.
Africa’s free market economies now embrace an economic agenda based on the premise that privatization require an end to distrustful politics that aroused tenacious bureaucratic resistance under the one party state. By advancing political freedoms of expressions, an end to human rights abuses and also free enterprises the atmosphere for distrust has dissipated at the onset of new democratic African states. The philosophy of government has shifted from obstructive regulation to demonstration of authority and political will to incentivize free enterprise.
The shift about reduced size and role of the public sector epitomize the contrast between the post colonial Africa and the African new on the same scale as the death of communism allowed economic democracy to thrive over the demise of state patronage.
I agree with Franklin Cudjoe's view that the developed states have“shackles that keep Africans poor: It is more surprising to hear EU and U.S. advocate for free market economy but does not practice it. If EU and U.S. trade barriers are removed, Adam smith’s theory of free market will be actualized.
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