We live in an age of shrinking states and expanding markets. The idea has diffused globally that market incentives are more likely than administrative commands to encourage economic production, distribution, and exchange. In Africa, as elsewhere in the developing world, a neoliberal intellectual and policy paradigm has influenced and redirected official development strategies. Since the early 1980s, governments in the sub-Saharan subcontinent have embarked, more or less voluntarily but sometimes with heavy-handed encouragement from international financial institutions, on programs to relax controlled economies. A broad consensus has emerged among scholars and policy analysts about the desirability of stabilizing public expenditures and liberalizing market prices, but debates continue about the pace of reform, its sequencing, and institutional arrangements. At issue is the size of the state. And the impacts of adjustment on poverty and inequality remain matters of intense dispute.

Since professional economists cannot agree, it would be startling if the inhabitants of African countries spoke with one clear voice on the subject of a market economy. We find that Africans who live in countries undergoing neoliberal reforms express ambivalent and contradictory views about these developments. On one hand, they assert personal self-reliance and tolerance of risk but, on the other, they insist that the state retain a preeminent presence in economic life. They are dissatisfied with the past and present performance of the economy, but optimistic (often unrealistically so) about the future. They support some elements in the structural adjustment package, but not others.