Refereeing Development: the Regulatory State and Struggle to Formalise Industrialise in East Africa

Why do economies grow and yet fail to industrialise? Why do decades of formalisation drives leave most firms informal? This book finds a missing part of the answer where few have looked: in the architecture of the regulatory state itself, the estate of authorities, boards and agencies standing between a firm and the formal economy. The evidence comes from a natural comparison. Three East African neighbours, sharing a region, a market and much of their administrative inheritance, arranged their regulatory estates in three different ways. Tanzania let its bodies multiply, one hundred and eleven across twenty-three sectors, counted here for the first time, and never connected them. Rwanda gathered its bodies into a few strong ones. Kenya left its many bodies standing but wired them together, so that a firm meets them through one door. What followed for firms in each country is the story of this book. Built on a full census of the Tanzanian estate, audited public accounts read body by body, and a scoring method any reform team can apply, the book shows that what a regulatory estate does to a country's transformation is not a matter of fate. The estate was constructed; it can be redrawn. Written in plain language for scholars and practitioners alike: the permanent secretary, the head of an authority, the reform team, and any reader of the South who suspects the referee of development has grown beyond anyone's design.