Robert Klitgaards Tropical Gangsters - Book Report/Review Example

Thus, the author investigates the creative possibilities and inherent limitations of outside assistance, the tensions between aid and dependency, between benevolence and autonomy, and the possible ways of action in this context. In the context of economic and political changes taking place in Africa, Robert Klitgaard is engaged in a fascinating and compelling account of his two-and-a-half-year adventure in Equatorial Guinea and it provides an insightful explanation of why foreign aid often fails to achieve its goals.

In the book Tropical Gangsters: One Man's Experience with Development and Decadence in Deepest Africa, Klitgaard, who is the former head of a multi-million dollar economic development program in Equatorial Guinea, convincingly gives an account of his struggles against government corruption, capitalist adventures, and bankrupt economic theories. The narrator was sent as an economist-consultant to Equatorial Guinea, a small West African nation that is one of the poorest countries of the world, by the World Bank in 1985.

Klitgaard has been highly effective in blending his personal reminiscence and economic analysis in his engaging memoir of his two-and-a-half-year struggle to rehabilitate the local economy. In the background of the modern tendency to move toward the free market across the world, the author suggests how the countries of Africa welcomed free market for economic development. "Africa has been the vanguard of a worldwide movement away from state-controlled economies and toward the free market. For years the prevailing wisdom concerning economic development advocated an interventionist state.

Government should be the mobilizers and managers of resources. In contrast, the new movement says that the private sector is the key to economic growth, and downplays the state's role as mobilizer and manager." (Klitgaard, 7) Thus, the author deals with the various aspects of the backward economies of the African countries and he makes exceptional note of lethargy, corruption, and adventurism as the basic issues affecting the progress of these economies.