Twenty‐first Century Industrial Policy in a Small Developing Country: The Challenges of Reviving Manufacturing in Rwanda

Abstract

The Rwandan government -widely lauded for its political commitment to development -has refocused its efforts on reviving growth in the manufacturing sector. This article examines how pressures from different levels -international, regional and domestic -have shaped the evolving political economy of two priority sectors (apparel and cement). To achieve its goals of manufacturing sector growth, the Rwandan government aims to access foreign markets (on preferential terms) and larger regional markets while developing effective state-business relationships with locally based firms. Despite the government's political commitment to reviving its manufacturing sector, its strategy has been both shaped and impeded by shifting pressures at the international level (through Rwanda's recent suspension from the African Growth and Opportunity Act), the regional level (through competition from regional firms) and the domestic level (through over-reliance on single firms). Within the current industrial policy literature, there is limited reflection on how developing countries are dealing with the multi-scalar challenges of enacting industrial policy in a much-changed global trading environment.

Sustainable and Dynamic Competitiveness towards Technological Leadership of Industry 4.0: Implications for East African Community

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The global politics of African industrial policy: the case of the used clothing ban in Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda

“…In the 1980s, Rwanda's first vertically integrated T&A firm, l'Usine textile du Rwanda (Utexrwa) had economic and non-economic sources of holding power, winning multiple public procurement contracts regionally (Behuria, 2019(Behuria, , p. 1047. Today, after losing personnel and equipment in the violence of the 1990s, Utexrwa's holding power largely derives from historic prestige.…”

“…It has been deployed to explain the successes and failures of industrial policy in different sectors within and across countries (Kjaer, 2015;Whitfield et al, 2015;Behuria & Goodfellow, 2016; see also Behuria et al, 2017;Kelsall, 2016). Until recently, however (see Hickey & Izama, 2017;Behuria, 2019;Tyce, 2019), it has treated global politics as marginal.…”

Value chain directionality, upgrading, and industrial policy in the Tanzanian textile and apparel sectors

“…The academic literature on industrial policy has not kept pace with changes in the global economy, with a lack of research into the complexities of policy-making at the national, regional, and global levels simultaneously (Behuria 2019). Further, questions of power and political economy are rarely given due attention in value chain studies (Dallas et al 2017;Andreoni 2019).…”