For a variety of dierent industrial sectors and across a range of dierent countries in sub-Saharan Africa, there is clear evidence that labour-intensive techniques generate not only substantially more employment than their capital-intensive alternatives, but more value-added as well. 1 There is just as much evidence, on the other hand that governments in the region tend to favour the latter over the former in those same sectors. 2 This apparent loss in output and employment was particularly important in the 1970s and early 1980s when the state occupied so dominant a position in the manufacturing sector of most African countries. Our purpose in this paper, however, is to suggest that the technological behaviour over the period in question was not as irrational as it is often depicted, because as we see it, the existing literature tends to ignore a crucial `third dimension' of the choice between capital and labour-intensive techniques that then confronted decision-makers in the public sector. And although the bulk of the paper is addressed to the historical period of dominance by the stateowned sector, we shall nevertheless also suggest that the issues in question remain relevant in the 1990s, in spite of the many reforms that most African countries subsequently underwent in connection, largely, with the process of structural adjustment.
Our discussion will be cast mainly in terms of Hirschman's concepts of trait-taking' and trait-making', because they reΒ―ect so keenly the issues on which the choice of technology in the public sector actually turn. Trait-taking' refers to a decision to accept some traits of a technology (or project) as temporarily unchangeable aspects of the environment', whereas `trait-making' refers to a decision to change existing traits of a technology (or project). In these terms, what we shall argue below is that:
(i) labour-intensive techniques often demand more trait-making, in terms of organizational and entrepreneurial capabilities, than is usually thought necessary, because in practice the choice is not between a single large-scale, capitalintensive plant and a single labour-intensive alternative, but rather between the former and a large number of small-scale plants;
CCC 0954Β±1748/99/060797Β±14$17.50