TROPICAL GANGSTERS: One Man’s Experience With Development...

TROPICAL GANGSTERS: One Man’s Experience With Development and Decadence in Deepest Africa by Robert Klitgaard (Basic: $10.95). An economist and professor of public policy at Harvard, Klitgaard recounts the 2 1/2 years he spent trying to help administer an International Monetary Fund aid project in Equatorial Guinea during the late 1980s. Composed of a few islands and a small tab of land between Cameroon and Gabon, Equatorial Guinea ranks among the poorest countries in increasingly impoverished sub-Saharan Africa, despite resources that include cocoa, coffee, timber and fishing. With a mixture of frustration, bewilderment and amusement, the author struggles to deal with an inefficient and flagrantly corrupt bureaucracy, an economy in shambles, a disintegrating communications system and an array of virulent diseases. Although Klitgaard continues to believe in the principle of richer nations helping poorer ones, he discovers aiding an underdeveloped country is far more difficult in practice than in theory: “Given Africa’s poverty, ignorance, disease, and dictators, we should not be surprised to find rampant opportunism, deceit and distrust; and these in turn foster flaccid and corrupt institutions--public, private and international. The harsh conditions of underdevelopment encourage tropical gangsters of every variety--government, business and international aid giver.”