Finance Ministers

"Roads are the blood vessels of the economy."

"We cannot continue to mourn about our country being poor while our minerals are lying untapped and with harvesting at Lake Natron, we will not be the first to do so, because our neighbours, Kenya, are doing the same on the other side of the lake."

"There are no demands - undue demands... There are many questions we get? why China? why now and the answer is why not?... There is no any hidden agenda in our cooperation with China, it is a relationship based on mutual understanding and equality; they understand our situation."

"Justice has to be done, justice must be seen to be done, what the AU is simply saying is that what is critical, what is the priority, is peace. That is priority number one now."

"I gazed at that small boat and said to myself, mhh, I am a Mkwere without swimming skills. Better for Membe because he has married in Mbamba Bay. He can swim."

"This is our kind of politics-to involve the people in staging protest marches, but not in matters that concern their very lives."

"This is senseless cruelty. It must stop forthwith... I am told that people kill albinos and chop their body parts, including fingers, believing they can get rich when mining or fishing."

"You’re negotiating all these problems for several years, they will talk about that, about a newspaper, they will talk about an underage boy in prison (for example). He’s 17 and he raped a nine-year-old, and they ask: “Why do you lock him up?” And so I say, what do you do, this is a rape case, and they want to discuss, I spend so many hours discussing whatever it is this boy... So what do they want us to do? Release him? So that he can go and rape another one?"

"They discuss no strings. There, the people, they don’t discuss anything. You can’t beat the British, you’ve got to sit with them for hours. They talk about this, they talk about that."

"I don’t think they (the Chinese) have better friends in Africa than us. But when we compare to how much money we get, if we succeed, if the MCA is funded by the US Congress for Tanzania, it’s going to be $700 Million. It’s going to be huge, it may be a total of all the Chinese have been giving us all these years."

"Why China suddenly is a question? Of course, there has been the concern that they may not be giving loans that are concessional, and the danger is that these countries might go back into the debt, some of the countries that they have been forgiven their debts. This I found to be a valid point, maybe not with Tanzania, because we don’t have much in terms of this huge Chinese development assistance."

"I would have been surprised if you had not asked that question, because everywhere I am, I am asked how about the Chinese. There’s a lot of sudden interest on the Chinese and Africa. You know, what is it that we are trying to do in Africa? Africa as a continent in pursuit of development."

"It's very sad that Tanzania is a poor football country. If elected, I promise to put this country on the world football map. I will make sure we produce our own Okochas, El Hadji Dioufs and Zinedine Zidanes here."

"Tanzania is standing by the people of Zimbabwe including President Mugabe... Mugabe is there, he is president, he has been elected. If Tanzania had simply said, stupid, you’re hopeless, a murderer, a violator of basic human rights; does that remove Mugabe from office? It doesn’t."

"I don’t know how to get the money but if [the radar] is overpriced, definitely we deserve to be paid … They cannot take money from a poor country."

"That day may come. But I’m not seeing it coming soon. We are still strong enough; we’re still popular; I think we are doing the right things."

"Those who expect radical changes in policy and direction are mistaken and lost. The government of the fourth republic will build on what was undertaken by previous governments and will continue with all good things."

"I’m not sure. I’m not sure if you talk to the opposition, they would consider that to be an insult. They think they are doing a tremendous job."

"The presidency is not an office job. If I only sit in the office in Dar es Salaam I’m not running the country. I visit the country to inspect development programmes, to inspect activities, to see how things are going, how the government agenda is being implemented, what are the teething issues. And some of these problems simply need my simple word. My simple word of do it, then it is done."

"What became a problem is there was a clause that allowed investors to cover losses. As long as you made losses one year, you could carry them over to the next and to the next. And because of that they would pay no taxes. So this fellow takes all the gold away and he says he makes losses and so he does not pay us anything. So he is the only one that is being protected. Those of us who are losing our resources are not protected. This is the thing that created the kind of debate that we had and we had to renegotiate."

"This year alone, total world cereal production was estimated to be 2,114 million tonnes, while total cereal demand was projected at around 1007 million tonnes, less than half of the cereal production. Ideally, no one should starve or die of hunger in the world we live. Strangely and sadly enough, they do. This is not fair. This is not right."

"I told them (TFF) that I will pay the salary of a foreign coach but to date nobody has come to me with any plans concerning the hiring of a coach. I have only heard them saying that Tanzania has been drawn in a tough group. They are just complaining instead of starting preparations. They are waiting to make excuses when the team fails to qualify."

"The innovation is hazardous, impossible for most producers. But if someone establishes a business having regard to this source of supply, and everything goes well, then he can produce a unit of product more cheaply, while at first the existing prices substantially continue to exist. He then makes a profit. Again he has contributed nothing but will and action, has done nothing but recombine existing factors. Again he is an entrepreneur, his profit entrepreneurial profit. And again the latter, and also the entrepreneurial function as such, perish in the vortex of the competition which streams after them. The case of the choice of new trade routes belongs here."

"Maybe we expect too much from democracy. The economist Joseph Schumpeter, one of the great modern thinkers to address the question, certainly thought so. Eighteenth-century optimists believed that there was such a thing as the common good, that people could determine it for themselves, and that they would then elect representatives to carry out their will. This “classical theory of democracy,” as Schumpeter argued in 1942, was more a quasi-religious expression of hope than an actual description of how democracies worked. There is no such thing as the common good, he delighted in pointing out. And even if there were, ordinary citizens, including the more educated among them, would be too irrational in their desires and too easily fooled to know what it might be. In theory democratic citizens raise and decide issues. In practice, “the issues that shape their fate are normally decided for them.”"

"The writings of Joseph Schumpeter contributed an essential part of the broad conceptual framework that now embraces the discussion of dynamic capabilities."

"The term ‘kinship’ correctly suggests the existence not only of contemporary relatives but also of ancestors. Indeed, the recent discussion of dynamic capability was prefigured historically, with a variety of terminology, in a number of sources. Perhaps the most directly relevant example among these earlier contributions is Schumpeter’s discussion of the ‘routinization of innovation’ (Schumpeter 1950). Schumpeter’s argument presented, however, an issue that remains central in contemporary discussion of dynamic capability—the possibly problematic character of the claim that there is such a thing as ‘learned competence’ for doingnew things."

"Schumpeter emphasizes a “demand-side” explanation for such clustering of innovation. One might also consider a complemen tary “supply-side” explanation: since innovators are, in many cases, working with the same components, it is not surprising to see simultaneous innovation, with several innovators coming up with essentially the same invention at almost the same time. There are many well-known examples, including the electric light, the airplane, the automobile, and the telephone."

"Schumpeter argued that the economy was characterized by a process of creative destruction. An innovator could, through a new product or lower costs of pro duction, establish a dominant position in a market. But eventually, that dominant position would be destroyed, as another new product or process was invented. He worried that the giant corporations he saw being formed during his lifetime would stifle innovation and end this process of creative destruction. His fears, so far, have been unfounded; indeed, many of the largest firms, like IBM, have not been able to manage the innovative process in a way that keeps up with upstart rivals."

"In my view—and that of most contemporary economists, I believe—Schumpeter’s most original and most lastingly significant book was Theory of Economic Development, which appeared in 1911 (and was translated into English in 1934). It was at the University of Czernowitz, not far from the beginning of his career as an economist, that he worked out his conception of the entrepreneur,the maker of “new combinations,” as the driving force and characteristic figure of the fits-and-starts evolution of the capitalist economy. He was explicit that, while technological innovation was in the long run the most important function of the entrepreneur, organizational innovation in governance, finance, and management was comparable in significance. […] I think that this is Schumpeter’s main legacy to economics: the role of technological and organizational innovation in driving and shaping the growth trajectory of capitalist economies. Whole subfields of economics now pursue the subject of the care, feeding, and consequences of innovation, using qualitative and quantitative, historical and mathematical methods."

"Now, at the turn of the millennia, when total-factor-productivity has remarkably soared in America and abroad, both fools and sages sing Schumpeter‘s praise. That would have amused and pleased this worldly scholar who in some dark hours of the night used to despair in his German-shorthand diaries of justly deserved praises passing him by. So Keynes was wrong: in the long run not all of us are dead."

"My Harvard teacher Joseph Schumpeter’s 1939 two-volume treatise is almost a parody of eclecticism: It described short cycles under the Kitchin-Crum terminology; then the good old business cycle of allegedly eight to ten years’ periodicity was labeled Juglar cycles; and of course there were also the long waves of Kondratieff and the Sunday newspaper supplements. But that was not the whole of it. In between Juglars and Kondratieffs came Kuznets’s intermediate cycles in construction and immigration, with an alleged approximate periodicity of 18 to 20 years. The tortured epicycles of pre-Copernicus Ptolemaic astronomy had nothing on Schumpeter."

"Schumpeter was uncharacteristically naive in awarding Lange and Lerner victory over Ludwig von Mises on the issue of whether rational economic calculation would be possible under socialism. Of course Mises was wrong in his sweeping rejection. But Schumpeter of all people should have understood the importance of uncertainty, stochastic error, and dynamic innovation in all social life. And this might have been expected to lead him to award the victory to Hayek for his insistence on the difficulty of pooling information when command and bureaucracy limit the workings of the market. Had Schumpeter lived another third of a century he would also have realized what Oskar Lange had to learn the hard way, that few socialist societies will play the Barone-Lerner-Lange game of simulated decentralized market pricing."

"Specifically, it discusses the possibilities for finding a viable alternative to neoclassical economic growth theory, in the form of some combination of Keynesian macroeconomics and evolutionary growth modeling. In this framework, economies are considered as complex adaptive systems which can generate dissipative structures, depending on the underlying knowledge dynamics and the energy throughput. This macroeconomic framework, which integrates short-run Keynesian elements with long-run Schumpeterian thinking, has to be considered as extremely powerful, both intellectually, as it allows for a much more comprehensive understanding of growth processes, as well as politically, as it offers a meaningful alternative to mainstream approaches which failed to predict the current economic and financial crisis and cannot offer meaningful answers how to get out of the crisis."

"Schumpeter’s approach has an important implication for political behavior. If the constellation of economic interests regularly changes because of innovation and entry, politicians face a fundamentally different world than those in a natural state: open access orders cannot manipulate interests in the same way as natural states do. Too much behavior and formation of interests take place beyond the state’s control. Politicians in both natural states and open access orders want to create rents. Rent-creation at once rewards their supporters and binds their constituents to support them. Because, however, open access orders enable any citizen to form an organization for a wide variety of purposes, rents created by either the political process or economic innovation attract competitors in the form of new organizations. In Schumpeterian terms, political entrepreneurs put together new organizations to compete for the rents and, in so doing, reduce existing rents and struggle to create new ones. As a result, creative destruction reigns in open access politics just as it does in open access economies. Much of the creation of new interests is beyond the control of the state. The creation of new interests and the generation of new sources of rents occur continuously in open access orders."

"We are far from understanding how to achieve adaptively efficient economies because allocative efficiency and adaptive efficiency may not always be consistent. Allocatively efficient rules would make today's firms and decisions secure - but frequently at the expense of the creative destruction process that Schumpeter had in mind."

"For Schumpeter, capitalism itself could not possibly make for conquest and war: its spirit was rational, calculating, and therefore averse to risk-taking on the scale implicit in warmaking and in other heroic antics. Interesting as they were as a counterpoint to the various Marxist theories of imperialism, Schumpeter's views evinced less awareness of the knottiness of the problem he was dealing with than those of Adam Ferguson and Tocqueville that have just been recalled. To go back even further: Cardinal de Retz, with his insistence that the passions are not to be counted out in situations where interest-motivated behavior is considered to be the rule, appears to have had the better part of the argument than either Keynes or Schumpeter."

"Schumpeter was the most romantic of economists, and capitalism to his eyes had all the glamor and excitement of a knightly jousting tourney."

"It was probably the influence of Schumpeter’s teaching more than the direct influence of Oskar Lange that has given rise to the growth of an extensive literature of mathematical studies of ‘resource allocation processes’. As far as I can see they deal as irresponsibly with sets of fictitious ‘data’ which are in no way connected with what the acting individuals can learn as any of Lange's."

"Schumpeter’s attempt to prove his assertion to the layman characteristically begins by assuming that ‘means of production are present in given and, for the moment, unalterable quantities’. He does not explain to whom these quantities are ‘given’, that is, known, nor how much about their various attributes and potentialities anybody knows."

"Speaking about great conversationalists among economists reminds me that you may wonder why I have not yet said more about Schumpeter—certainly the most brilliant talker among economists I have known with the sole exception of Keynes, with whom he had many other things in common, not least a puckish itch pour épater le bourgeois and a certain pretence to omniscience and a tendency to bluff which went far beyond their astounding knowledge. So far as Schumpeter is concerned, the fact is that during the few post-war years he lived at Vienna he had scarcely any contact with the economists and saw little even of those who had been his contemporaries in the Böhm-Bawerk seminar. Of course his two pre-war books and his essay on money were familiar to all of us. But we hardly saw him and some of his pronouncements on current affairs had earned him a reputation as an enfant terrible among economists."

"That an economist of Professor Schumpeter's standing should thus have fallen into a trap which the ambiguity of the term "datum" sets to the unwary can hardly be explained as a simple error. It suggests rather that there is something fundamentally wrong with an approach which habitually disregards an essential part of the phenomena with which we have to deal: the unavoidable imperfection of man's knowledge and the consequent need for a process by which knowledge is constantly communicated and acquired. Any approach, such as that of much of mathematical economics with its simultaneous equations, which in effect starts from the assumption that people's knowledge corresponds with the objective facts of the situation, systematically leaves out what is our main task to explain."

"The developed economies are currently experiencing profound changes. A technological revolution is creating entirely new sectors, based on biotechnology, microprocessors, and telecommunications, whose prod­ucts are transforming business practices across the economy. A wave of managerial innovations has seen companies around the world adopt new forms of supplier-client relations, just-in-time inventory systems, quality control and team production. Economic activity is shifting from the industrial sector into the service sector. Capitalism seems to be in the midst of one of those 'cycles of creative destruction' that Schumpeter (1950) identified."

"[E]conomics is all around us, and we should cultivate the experience of it in many ways besides formal study. ...Joseph A. Schumpeter is reputed to have made the purist claim that the best way to economics is to study history and mathematics. Even the non-purist would have to agree that these two subjects contribute greatly to economic education, as would many other diverse subjects, such as sociology, psychology, geography, agriculture, urban studies, the law, engineering, public health, transportation, computer programming, and the closely related field of business and public administration. ...The ... catalogues its members according to thirty-six... areas of specialization, but... there must be thousands of different enthusiasms and points of view. And the best way to serve all of these is to study economics directly."

"We have far more people selling derivatives, index funds and mutual funds (as we call them) than there is intelligence for the task. I am cautious about prediction; I discovered years ago that my correct predictions are forgotten, the others meticulously remembered. But some things are definite; when you hear it being said that we have entered a new economy of permanent prosperity with prices of financial instruments reflecting that happy fact, you should take cover. This has been the standard justification of speculative excess for several centuries — for a good part of the millennium. My one time Harvard colleague Joseph Schumpeter thought inevitable and even beneficial what he called “creative destruction” — the cyclical process by which the system eliminates the people and institutions which are mentally too vulnerable for useful economic service. Unfortunately the process has larger and less benign effects, including the possibility of painful recession or depression."

"Aside from Yugoslavia, experiments with decentralization did not extend to planning innovation, the greatest weakness of the socialist economies. Even where markets were allowed to exert more influence over current production, the state was still responsible for planning the future. And state socialism provided only weak incentives for innovation. The Schumpeterian pressure that forced capitalist firms to innovate or die was not present in the planned economy."

"Empire was the equivalent of a modern-day sports team... The military aristocracy loved to play, and the people loved to watch. Schumpeter hated this. And he thought that it was on the way out—that as people became richer and more prosperous, the burgeois virtues would win, and the drive for empire would die. Schumpeter expected the con to end, and a peaceful, less aristocratic, less imperial, less bloodthirsty twentieth century. He was wrong."

"I can say that General Theory develops, justifies, rationalizes, extends, applies, and shows economists how to use what had by then become the author's standard themes and approaches in a way that Business Cycles, the History of Economic Analysis, and even Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy do not. Back in 1970, the economist Harry G. Johnson pointed out that all successful founders of schools not only are geniuses with profound insights but also provide a road map that tells their followers and successors what to do to make a successful academic career within the school. Schumpeter did not do that second part."

"Although democratic ideas often yield rather ambiguous answers to the question of inclusion. Schumpeter was an exception. … Schumpeter’s solution, or rather nonsolution, was to allow a demos to draw any line it chooses between itself and other members. … Schumpeter's solution to the problem of composition of the demos is unacceptable, because it effectively erases the distinction between democracy and a nondemocratic order dominated by a collegial elite."

"The aristocratic and the modern were inextricably combined in Joseph Schumpeter. The paradoxes of this great economist, who also served as minister of finance in the post- World War I government of Austria, are suggested by the fact that at his first teaching post, he challenged the university librarian to a duel to win freer access to books for the students. Perhaps Schumpeter was attracted to the big issues because he himself witnessed drastic changes in society."

"Schumpeter always argued that capitalism, as an intrinsically amoral economic system driven by the pursuit of profit, dissolvent of all barriers to market calculation, depended critically on pre-capitalist - in essence nobiliary - values and manners to hold it together as social and political order. But this aristocratic 'under-girding', as he put it, was typically reinforced by a secondary structure of support, in bourgeois milieux confident of the moral dignity of their own calling: subjectively closer to portraits by Mann than Flaubert."