PRIVATIZATION AND THE ROLES OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE INSTITUTIONS IN AGRICULTURAL-RESEARCH IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

Privatization has become a popular panacea for solving the organizatio nal problems of LDC governments. This paper considers the role of the private sector in agricultural research, especially in sub-Saharan Afr ica. The first section provides a brief background by stating the main arguments for market failure in the allocation of resources to resear ch, followed by the reasoning behind the reaction against public inter vention. The arguments for intervention are then applied to the differ ent areas of agricultural research activity to show that the level of public intervention should depend on the type of research. We suggest that there are several criteria for defining public and private activi ties and that there are few research activities that can be easily cla ssified as purely public or purely private. This implies that the appr opriate split between public and private research has several dimensio ns and that efficient institutional arrangements will be specific to p articular activities. The evidence suggests that there are sound econo mic arguments for changing the domains of the public and private secto rs, which should not be static. Both economic development and technica l innovations, such as biotechnology, will move the boundary in favour of increased private activity, but the public and private contributio ns should be viewed as complementary investments rather than substitut es.