Pt.1: Institutional capacity and economic performance in Africa: Introduction: unbundling capacity building -- 1. Institutional disconnect and economic performance -- Pt. 2: Reconciling the state and civil society: 2. Client-Stakeholder assessment of the quality of the civil service -- 3. Improving governance and macroeconomic management -- 4. Capacity building for poverty reduction -- Pt. 3: Reconciling the formal and informal private sectors: 5. Developing the indigenous private sector: microenterprises to formal enterprises -- 6. Developing the indigenous private sector: reconciling the needs for saving and sharing capital -- 7. Developing the indigenous private sector: filling the financial missing middle -- 8. Enhancing african enterprise byreconciling corporate and societal cultures -- Pt. 4: Conclusions: process and institutional requirements and operational implications for reconciliation: 9. Process and institutional requirements for the reconciliation paradigm -- 10. Operational implications for donor support -- Appendixes: 1. Statistical data base for chapter -- 2. Summary of chilean public ethics report -- 3. Framework for civil service reform to reconcile the state and civil society -- 4. The reconciliation process -- 5. Communiqué of the expert consultation on the role of independent funds as intermediaries in channeling money for social and economic development in Africa

Contrary to traditional Afro-pessimism, the Africa ' s Management in the 1990s (AM90s) research program illustrates that Africa possesses a substantial reservoir of capacity endowments and best practices on which to build in order to improve the institutional and economic performance of the continent. While not denying the existence and extent of the economic crisis, the AM90s research illustrates that institutional reconciliation will be a key to the institutional and economic development of Africa. More important, the proposed solutions are mostly homegrown and are therefore likely to strengthen self-sufficiency and reduce dependency on foreign assistance. The overarching theme of the research is that the institutional crisis affecting economic management in Africa is a crisis of structural disconnect between formal institutions transplanted from outside and indigenous institutions born of traditional African culture. Building on the findings and recommendations of the new school of institutional economics, the AM90s research posits that both formal and informal institutions are here to stay and are needed in Africa, but in a more flexible form. It is through adaptation that formal and informal institutions can converge and build on each other ' s strength and that transaction costs can be reduced and institutional performance maximized. This process for building convergence is at the heart of institutional reconciliation paradigm proposed in this report.