By Pape Demba Thiam, former World Bank executive.
Contrary to popular belief, more ideological than operational schools, the market economy is absolutely not incompatible with strategic planning, which is at the core of state interventions.
Etymologically, a true economist cannot simply measure, report, or passively describe what is happening in their environment, to then just pull out universal recipes from a formatted toolbox and use them like a robotic bureaucrat.
A true economist must be ambitious, ingenious, and enterprising, as they seek to identify risks and constraints, to intervene and transform their environment, including by creating appropriate and effective concepts, tools, and instruments.
Thus, the work of an economist can bring various bodies of expertise and professions together to correct structural distortions, such as installing missing links in potential value chains, to contribute to creating integrated competitiveness platforms, enabling an economy to be competitive by attracting de-risked and viable investments, and allowing its companies to make better use of provisions in the global market economy.
Viewed from this perspective, the greatest cause of the crisis in the globalized and ultra-liberalized world economy is the severe lack of true economists in the Western world.
Paradox only in appearance, it is an officially communist China with a planned economy that is nowadays one of the biggest winners in the open market global economy, while the United States, which imposed ultra-liberalism of the global market economy on the entire world, is turning back to protectionism.
Historically, most economists and other intellectuals in post-independence Africa focused on analyses and publications aimed at ideologically explaining the harms of exploitation systems on their continent.
Their work was used to urge African leaders to align with one of the Cold War blocs or join the non-aligned movement. Paradoxically, they did not propose independent economic models specific to Africans.
Their intellect did not invent or create African political economies centered on transforming the continent’s economic opportunities, to encourage its leaders to implement strategies, programs, projects, and interventions enabling the controlled economic and social development of their populations.
The fall of the Berlin Wall sent these left-wing economists into a sort of retirement, while the new macroeconomists, aligned with the Bretton Woods institutions, found employment with their liberalization, stabilization, and structural adjustment programs, all born from the public debt trap.
