STATE RESILIENCE AGAINST THE ODDS: AN ANALYTICAL NARRATIVE ON THE CONSTRUCTION

Zambia is now one of the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is a land-abundant but sparsely populated country of 11 million inhabitants. This paper attempts to explain why the Zambian state has remained resilient over the period 1960-2010 despite confronting a substantial set of crises and unfavourable ‘initial conditions’, which include: one of the worst declines in per capita income in sub-Saharan Africa since 1970, a heavy debt burden, dramatic price and production declines in its main export (copper), one of the continent’s most unequal distributions of income, one of the worst HIV/AIDS epidemics in the world, declines in its Human Development Index in every decade since 1980, relatively high levels of poverty, substantial influxes of refugees (particularly in the 1990s) that reached as high as 200,000, high transport costs as a result of being a landlocked economy, and being surrounded by five countries that have experienced civil wars and political disorder. By any conceivable measure, the growth performance of Zambia has been poor (see Table 1). Zambia’s long-run trajectory of economic decline is closely related to the dramatic decline in its main industry, copper. In 1969, Zambia was the largest producer of copper among developing countries, and the third largest producer after the United States and the forme