Paper short abstract:

In Madagascar, one of the main reasons for the country's problems is its poor ability to establish a stable political consensus surrounding the wealth accumulation and distribution processes. Power games, elites and the institutions they fashion to their advantage are obvicentral to the equation.

Paper long abstract:

Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world today. Not only has per capita GDP been trending downward since 1960, but every time the country has set out on a growth path, it has been stopped in its tracks by a socio-political crisis that has shattered the hopes it raised.

The inability to explain the particularity of Madagascar's trajectory using a purely economistic approach ultimately points to the need for an integrated political economy study. On this score, a promising conceptual framework has been proposed by North and his co-authors (2009 & 2012) with special emphasis on the role of elites and the coalitions they knit for the sharing economic rents and the control of violence. The conjunction of economic growth periods and political crises does indeed suggest that one of the main reasons for the country's problems might well be its poor ability to establish a stable political consensus surrounding the wealth accumulation and distribution processes.

Madagascar features a lack of stable, long-term coalitions of elites. The elites hence appear to be highly individualistic, and thereby atomised. It is only when a small group around the presidential clan obtains excessive power that temporary alliances form. This shortcoming provides a partial explanation for the country's instability.

The scant attention paid the populations and the fragility of the clientelistic connections do not afford broad-based popular support for the men in power. Malagasy farmers and many of the informal sector workers have not really been "captured" by either the political system or the economic system.