Standard stuff denied the masses of folks in this part of the world: nutritious food, clean water, electricity and essential appliances, housing, healthcare, education, clothing, transport, to begin... most of which could be manufactured locally, with local inputs, were there political will to overcome the obvious constraints (insufficient effective demand and skewed production/distribution systems).
> And, if racist
> Rhodesia was the model of internally oriented development,
Ahem, comrade. Whose "model"? You doing caricature?
> how well
> off was the black population, and what was the trend in their
> welfare? Were they healthy and literate, and getting moreso? Or did
> it just have enough juice to pamper the white minority, the rest be
> damend?
Short answer (from conclusion to Ch.5 of Uneven Zimbabwe):
This chapter has explored aspects of the rise and fall of Rhodesia's UDI economy. We noted, in particular, that overaccumulation crisis was characterised by unevenness of investment, output and consumption between the luxury and basic consumer goods industries and certain of the capital goods industries. In part this sectoral unevenness can be attributed to particularly malevolent reactions by state and capital to economic crisis and guerrilla war, which made for increasing disparities of income and power between races and between classes.
...
Long answers (Chs5&6):
Extensive (capital-widening) rather than intensive (capital-deepening) investment was initially the rule not only in manufacturing but also in agriculture. White commercial farmers attributed 41% of their growth in output from 1965-74 to land expansion, which also involved increasing the number of black employees by 70,000 during that period. Notwithstanding the hardships inflicted by extremist Rhodesian Front land policies, peasant farmers also managed to increase their land under cultivation by 26% during the first few years of UDI, as output increased by 32% -- hence four- fifths of growth was a result of land expansion (Mumbengegwi, 1986, 208). Uneven sectoral development between capital goods and consumer goods was, partly as a result, kept effectively in check for a full decade, even if unevenness in luxury versus basic needs consumption was increasing.
Also during this time, the balance of power in the industrial class struggle swung heavily towards capital, and a lowly 8% of gross industrial revenues were spent on black workers' wages in 1969. Even in the mid 1970s with a liberation war underway, Handford (1976, 145) could brag, "At present, possibly the biggest advantage enjoyed by Rhodesia in regard to the more developed nations is its absence of labour troubles." There were, interprets Lloyd Sachikonye (1986, 251), no fewer than 68 trade union leaders in detention in 1973:
It is scarcely surprising that in the 1960s
and 1970s a dark cloud hovered over trade
unionism in Zimbabwe. A decimation of
the leadership of unions through its
incarceration in detention or exile, the
onerous labour laws, in addition to the
dubious role of international labour
institutions such as the Brussels-based
International Confederation of Free Trade
Unions -- all had a generally weakening
impact on the unions.
...
While in aggregate economic terms the war may have been counter-cyclical during this period, nevertheless the skills shortages, social tensions and physical destruction that accompanied it probably overpowered any economic stimulation. However, Davies (1982, 300) argues that "Because of the substitution of black for white workers that has taken place, I would argue that the effects of the war on output have not been great, and that one has therefore to look elsewhere for the primary reasons for the recession."
Davies and Colin Stoneman (1981, 95-96) instead take recourse in "underconsumption" as an explanation: "it is generally accepted that the discrimination against the rural population and the low level of black wages must have restricted the size of the internal market." Industrialists themselves viewed the problem primarily in these terms at particular junctures, with 57% of those polled by the University of Zimbabwe in 1981 (a year in which large real consumption increases actually occurred) citing insufficient domestic buying power as a factor constraining industrial expansion. It is true, too, that from 1974-78, as the recession hit black workers especially hard, larger purchases such as furniture (blacks made up 51% of the domestic market) and even clothing and footwear (68% of the market) suffered reductions of 28% and 12%, respectively (Wield, 1980, 128,107).
On the other hand, however, total consumption expenditure by private residents actually increased in real terms from 1974-76. The single most substantial annual decline in total consumption during the crisis was then 12% (in 1977), a smaller drop than that experienced elsewhere in the economy (for example, in manufacturing capacity utilisation) (CSO, National Income and Expenditure Report). And while black wages were extremely low, the share of gross operating profits relative to wages was actually lowest (36%) in 1977 and 1978, the two years of deepest recession. Moreover, from 1978 to 1980, profits took a high and increasing share of national income, yet this was the period in which recovery began (Kadhani, 1986, 106). Moreover, while manufacturing and agricultural investment were devastated by the downturn, private consumption expenditure in the (mainly white) luxury-goods market was not nearly so badly affected, which in turn suggests that underconsumption was not obviously the driving force behind the crisis.
Stoneman (1981, 281) quickly advanced beyond simple underconsumption theory by noting the disarticulation of production and consumption, in Rhodesia's notoriously skewed racial context:
The market became more distorted in the
direction of luxury consumption, a
tendency reinforced by sanctions against
imports. A number of manufacturing
industries (in particular in food processing
and clothing) had developed to supply
black needs both domestically and in the
Federation, and their attention was
redirected to the white market... Much of
the new industry has therefore been at the
expense of far more urgently needed rural
investment and is furthermore geared to
supplying luxury products on a very small
scale, rather than the basic requirements of
the population as a whole.
This kind of uneven sectoral development closely matches other more general arguments about failed import substitution industrialisation models in the Third World (de Janvry, 1982).
[FN: According to Nixson (1982, 50), "ISI does not in general result in greater self-reliance or self-sufficiency. ISI has been heavily dependent on foreign capital, technology and expertise, it has been based on the consumption patterns, tastes, marketing techniques, and so on, of the developed capitalist economies and the changes in the import structure and the failure to alleviate the balance- of-payments constraint have exacerbated the dependence of the IS economy on the external sector."]
Nevertheless, the blame for Rhodesia's crisis cannot be laid primarily at the door of low-income blacks' failure to gain access to "basic need" commodities relative to their consumption of these in prior years. Throughout the 1970s, the major food processing industries reflected the residual strength of consumption in both white high- income and black low-income markets. Beer suffered virtually no underconsumption crisis, and along with cigarettes, represented the largest single item (15%) of personal consumption expenditure. Similarly, meat processing and dairy products experienced significant build-up of inventories mainly during the few years occasioned by factors in the fields, but both subsectors continued growing in real terms during the four worst years of economic slump.
Finally, underspending in key counter-cyclical sectors (like construction) is not a convincing reason for the crisis, because if such were the case, post-independence state fiscal expansion, and sustained building activity would have led to a more sustainable growth path than was ultimately experienced. In sum, with factors such as investment, capacity utilisation and production falling far faster and further than consumption, it is on the supply side, not the demand (underconsumption) side, that we might better focus our attention.
...
Thus the nature -- and depth -- of the 1970s crisis of the Rhodesian economy was already predetermined, in a sense, by the ruling class failure to come to grips with the challenge of constructing a trajectory of sustainable accumulation during the early 1960s. In spite of the state's valiant efforts to balance investment in the appropriate sectors, UDI-era manufacturers placed exorbitant emphasis on luxury goods production for the domestic white market, rather than expanding into extensive low-cost basic consumer goods which might have helped generate increased buying power in the process and which would have had greater export potential into independent Africa. Not only did the political-economic climate overencourage producers of certain capital goods, it ultimately widened the socio-economic and political divisions between whites and blacks within Rhodesia. Soon, the depth of the economic crisis proved a greater threat to the business establishment than the prospect of government by nominally-"Marxist-Leninist" forces, with whom business leaders increasingly sought reconciliation.
This survey of overaccumulation in Rhodesia during the 1970s highlighted the relationship between investment and build-up of year-end stocks that was at the root of the economic slump. But overaccumulated capital may have been displaced, temporarily, or at least more effectively managed, were it not for other exogenous factors that drained the regenerative capacity of the productive sectors. To some degree, crisis displacement was subsequently attempted through both spatial and temporal processes, as described next.
...
AND AS FOR THE ALTERNATIVE (BASIC- NEEDS) STRATEGY,
The potential for further "inward industrialisation" along this path was substantial. For example, as shown in Chapter Nine, housing is a commodity that can be produced with very minor import costs in Zimbabwe. Had there been a more equal distribution of income and strategic targeting of government subsidies after independence, housing could easily have been the basis for a successful Keynesian "kick-start" and antidote to stagnation. And thorough-going land reform (as well as proactive intervention in financial markets and industrial organisation) had been a key element of some East Asian industrialising countries' strategy for developing an internal class base for consumption of basic manufactured goods, and was occasionally suggested as the basis for inward-oriented capital accumulation (Robinson, 1988).
Such approaches would not have solved the deep-rooted industrial overaccumulation crisis, but would probably have delayed and dampened the crisis by combining the best tendencies of manufacturing growth in the early UDI period -- the broadening of production, the closer articulation with local markets, the localisation of decision-making, and the control of financial markets that would make all the above feasible -- with the post-independence "Growth with Equity" rhetoric of meeting democratically-determined basic needs.