followed by chapters that examine empirically such dimensions as household level income diversification in rural areas, and agriculture–nonfarm linkages. The policy environment surrounding RNFE is examined from chapter 12 onwards, and begins with a rehearsal of fairly standard arguments about the failures of state interventionism in the 1960s and 1970s leading to the neo-liberal market liberalisation response in the 1990s. Their enthusiasm for RNFE allows the editors and authors of the book to entertain roles for the state in facilitating and promoting the sector that are set out and elaborated in chapters 12–15. This is all mainly light-touch stuff to do with fostering facilitating rather than debilitating regulatory environments and infrastructure provision, as well as ensuring level playing fields when global players enter local agricultural supply chains. The book contains a lot of empirical information about the RNFE in a wide range of countries, and also tests various relationships to do with poverty reducing impact, agricultural growth multipliers, size distribution and dynamics of firms and so on. Provided that you buy in to the overall hypothesis that RNFE is a special sector that acts as a vital bridge (in a path-dependent sense) between agricultural growth and future urban-based growth sectors, then this is definitely the book for you. It is state of the art in the RNFE literature. Nevertheless, not all students of strategic growth processes agree with the golden sequence portrayed by the RNFE enthusiasts. Ashwani Saith famously called RNFE a ‘bargain-basement sector’ comprising micro enterprises of such tentative existence and duration that they could never collectively amount to much in the economic growth stakes (Saith, A., 1992, The Rural Non-Farm Economy: Processes and Policies, Geneva: Inter- national Labour Office, World Employment Programme). In a well-known article written many years ago, Hymer and Resnick (Hymer, S. and S. Resnick, 1969, ‘A Model of an Agrarian Economy with Nonagricultural Activities’, American Economic Review, vol. 59, no. 4) predicted that village shops in remote rural areas would soon be selling plastic buckets made in China rather than locally produced earthenware pots, thus failing to create local employment and income multipliers. Then there is the broader question of why select rurally-based non-farm enterprise for special attention, when all nascent enterprises, whether rural or urban, need the same encouragement to survive and thrive, and surely it is resources and markets that determine whether these happen to be located in villages, small towns, district centres, or big cities. Frank Ellis ª 2008 School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia Growing Apart: Oil, Politics and Economic Change in Indonesia and Nigeria Peter Lewis Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007, pp. xi þ 345, $24.95, ISBN-13 978 0 472 09980 1 This is an ambitious project that deals with a big issue in present-day development studies: why do Asian countries perform on the whole so much better than African countries? The choice of countries here is particularly apt as these countries are similar in so many respects: both are big, populous countries; both have a large Muslim and a large Christian population; both have a history of military government; both are oil producers and both are perceived as problematic with respect to good governance. Indonesia is at place 143 and Nigeria at 147 in the Corruption Perception Index of Transparency International. Yet, as the most striking chapter in this book – Chapter 6: ‘Comparing Economic Performance’ – shows: Indonesia’s economy grew much faster than Nigeria’s. In 1965 Indonesia’s per capita GDP was lower than Nigeria’s, whereas in 2000 Indonesia’s per capita GDP was five times as high as Nigeria’s. Indonesia’s exports had diversified to a large degree from oil, whereas Nigeria was extremely dependent upon oil for export revenue. Similar comparisons are made for many variables, including many social indictors that show particularly shocking comparisons with respect to the health situation. This chapter deserves to figure prominently in reading lists for 764 Book Reviews