Globalization and Business Politics in Arab North Africa
Morocco against Tunisia: why business lobbies formed differently and what it did to reform.
Summary
The reference has not verified this book in detail; the summary states only what the title, author and subject establish.
Cammett, a political scientist, compared Morocco and Tunisia to explain why business communities in similar countries responded differently to trade liberalisation.
The reference has not verified the book's detailed contents. The comparative puzzle is that both countries opened to European trade under association agreements in the 1990s, both had textile and clothing sectors exposed to that opening, and both had authoritarian governments, yet their business associations and the political capacity of their private sectors developed differently.
Cammett's analysis, as she has presented it, argues that the structure of the business community rather than the policy determined the response. Where a sector's firms were of similar size and faced similar conditions, they could organise collectively and press for policies serving the sector. Where the sector contained a few large politically connected firms alongside many small ones, the large firms obtained what they needed individually through political access, which removed their incentive to build a collective organisation, and the small firms lacked the resources to organise alone.
The implication is that the political capacity of a private sector depends on the distribution of firm size and political access within it, and that a sector with a few well-connected large firms will not develop the collective institutions that press for general improvements in the business environment.
This connects to the wider literature on state-business relations in the Middle East and North Africa represented elsewhere in this reference, including Hertog and Luciani's edited volume and the Diwan, Malik and Atiyas work on crony capitalism.
Readers should verify the book's specific arguments and evidence.
Key takeaways 7
- Business communities in similar countries facing the same trade opening responded differently depending on their internal structure.
- Where firms in a sector are of similar size and face similar conditions, they can organise collectively to press for sector-wide policy.
- Where a few large politically connected firms coexist with many small ones, the large firms obtain what they need individually.
- Individual political access removes the incentive for large firms to build collective business organisations.
- Small firms alone lack the resources to sustain the associations that would represent the sector.
- The political capacity of a private sector depends on the distribution of firm size and political access within it.
- A sector without collective institutions cannot press for general improvements in the business environment.
Who should read it
Analysts of state-business relations who want a comparative account of when private sectors develop collective political capacity, verified against the book's evidence.
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Where it sits in the reference 2
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