Is Mozambique’s elite moving from corruption to development?

UNU-WIDER Conference on
the Role of Elites in Economic Development
Helsinki, Finland, 12-13 June 2009

By Joseph Hanlon and Marcelo Mosse


Mozambique’s elite has responded to five decades of rapid change and international pressure by staying united and steering a course that tried to balance the conflicting pressures of national development, self-interest, and the demands of the international community. This paper argues that after a period of donor-supported corruption, crude rent-seeking and unsuccessful Washington Consensus policies, the elite has shifted into using the state to promote the creation of business groups that could be large enough and dynamic enough to follow a development model with some similarities to the Asian Tigers, industrial development in Latin America, or Volkskapitalisme in apartheid South Africa.