Abstract

The Republic of the Sudan is the largest political unit in Africa, being just under one million square miles, or about the size of the U.S. east of the Mississippi. To encourage the nation's economic development and promote its increasing integration with the world economy, the administration therefore had to import business firms into Sudan. This encouragement did not necessarily spring from a fixed intellectual or moral commitment to capitalism and its institutions, since the same administrators methodically proceeded to make government the prime economic and social institution in Sudan, as it still is and to establish rigorous rules of the game with which private expatriate, as well as private local, firms had to comply. The underlying government thesis was the welfare of the Sudanese population, not the welfare of private firms at the expense of the Sudanese consumer. The positive policy of keeping a watchful eye on foreign firms was balanced, of course, by the equally acute awareness of the need for these firms to handle international trade and finance, domestic finance and large-scale commerce and trade.