The peace accord signed in October 1992 and multiparty elections held in October 1994 brought to Mozambique fresh hopes and opportunities. Post-war reconstruction has been underway for some years, through an array of projects ranging from hand-outs for demobilised soldiers to the World Bank supported Roads and Coastal Shipping (ROCS) rehabilitation project running from 1994 to 2000. Although there is political tension between the two main parties and former contestants in the civil war, Frelimo and Renamo, and a combination of rising urban crime and sporadic banditry on roads in rural areas, generally there has been a strong improvement in political stability and physical security for the majority of the population. Economic reforms, broadly typical of World Bank/IMF stabilisation and structural adjustment programmes, have accelerated during the 1990s and have been underwritten by substantial external financial support. The end of war together with deregulating policy reforms and a sweeping privatisation programme have provoked a surge in foreign investor interest in the country. In aggregate terms and in spite of data caveats, the evidence suggests that Mozambique has become one of the fastest growing economies in Sub-Saharan Africa during the 1990s.

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

High rent creates contests for its capture that, unless skilfully managed, degrade political institutions and distort the economy, leading to a collapse of growth if unreformed. Mauritania's projected oil stream risks such an outcome because past rent‐driven growth has left a legacy of Dutch disease effects, rent‐seeking and dependent social capital. This article proposes a dual‐track strategy for deploying the oil rent as a politically practical means of managing social tensions and improving the economic outcome. Track one promotes a dynamic market economy in the hitherto neglected rural areas, while track two gradually reforms the rent‐driven urban sector, thus postponing confrontation with established rent‐seekers while the dynamic sector drives competitive diversification of the economy and builds a pro‐reform political constituency.

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. The Mauritanian Labor Market through the Lens of the 2004 National Household Survey 11 We are grateful to the Mauritanian authorities for their support, notably the National Institute of Statistics, (ONS) for the availability of the 2004 National Household Survey data, and the Ministry of Economic and Finance (MEF). We also thank for insight and comments Alexandre Kolev and Paul Cichello. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions are our own and should not be attributed to the World Bank, its Executive Board of Directors, or any of its member countries. The usual disclaimers apply.

No abstract

There is a striking scarcity of work conducted on rural labour markets in the developing world, particularly in Africa. This book aims to fill this gap by bringing together a group of contributors who boast substantial field experience researching rural wage employment in various developing countries. It provides critical perspectives on mainstream approaches to rural/agrarian development, and analysis of agrarian change and rural transformations from a long-term perspective.This book challenges the notion that rural areas in low-and middle-income countries are dominated by self-employment. It purports that this conventional view is largely due to the application of conceptual frameworks and statistical conventions that are ill-equipped to capture labour market participation. The contributions in this book offer a variety of methodological lessons for the study of rural labour markets, focusing in particular on the use of mixed methods in micro-level field research, and more emphasis on capturing occupation multiplicity.The emphasis on context, history, and specific configurations of power relations affecting rural labour market outcomes are key and reoccurring features of this book. This analysis will help readers think about policy options to improve the quantity and quality of rural wage employment, their impact on the poorest rural people, and their political feasibility in each context.

Pitcher's rejoinder to our paper (Cramer & Pontara 1998), is a useful contribution to the policy and analytical debate on poverty and rural relations in Mozambique. Some of her points are well taken, in particular her careful attention to empirical imprecision in much of the literature. Indeed, she points out that we used a figure for how much land the government had conceded to private owners that turns out to be mistaken. We accept this useful clarification graciously, though slightly less graciously would point out that Pitcher earlier cited the same (erroneous) figure herself.Overall, her complaint about our paper seems to boil down to the following: that we are incomplete in our coverage of the literature; that we fail to notice that the government may say it favours smallholders but is in fact leaving them high and dry by allocating resources to large-scale commercial investors; and that we present an exclusive choice between the land and the labour market as the solution to poverty in Mozambique. On the first point, our coverage was indeed less than complete, though the implications of this are not as Pitcher implies. On the second, we think the picture is more complex than she suggests, and if our paper did not make this adequately clear we shall try to make it more so here. On the third part of her complaint, Pitcher is plainly wrong: in fact, the most interesting thing about her comment on our paper is that she appears entirely to have missed the point that we were making and does not engage with our core argument at all. She is at pains to agree with our discussion of the socioeconomic differentiation that has a long-term and more recent history in rural Mozambique, and to present the lives of the poor as highly insecure. Nonetheless, she makes little effort to consider the implications of this beyond making the fairly obvious point that people hang onto their land when they can and pursue multiple and ‘redundant’ (whatever this is supposed to mean) strategies.