State-Business Relations in Sudan: The Prospects for A Dynamic Private Sector

This paper reviews the state-business relations (SBRs) forged by the state rulers in Sudan who created influential historical legacies relating to the mobilization of the private sector, households, and firms for funding the state’s budget and programs. Our major objective is to understand why some rulers survived on productive rent, while others chose unproductive rent alternatives. The analysis focuses on unpacking the “implied” SBR policy deals in each case and assessing why the chosen policy succeeded and how the private sector was impacted. Literature on SBRs is new and largely dominated by industrial relations studies. Thus, in addition to this literature, the analytical framework draws from the recent literature on the comparative political economy of development. A major consensus in these strands of literature is that the emergence of state rulers who coordinate rather than fight is crucial for coercing SBRs that are decisive for ascending a spectrum of state types and social orders, along which the organizations of SBRs become less bound to rulers. The overall result reveals that the stability of the policy environment is a key pillar for the successful governance of the interactions between the rulers and private actors. Other results show that all rulers who effectively deployed SBRs reasonably separated the organization of the state from the organization of SBRs and heavily relied on the continuity of business norms to build trust for the internalization of their ideas and the mobilization of private actors. The comparative analysis of these experiences is hoped to draw some policy lessons for the reformist of SBRs in Sudan after the major shift in the source of power in favor of the revolutionists.