The population of sub-Saharan Africa is around 950 million people, and growing. They have been a prime target of aid for generations, but it remains the poorest region of the world.
In absolute terms, conditions in sub-Saharan Africa have improved a lot. Saying “poorest” only states that it hasn’t caught up with the rest of the world, which is also improving.
That’s true. But conditions in sub-Saharan Africa have improved by a lot less than in other regions that were extremely poor 50 years ago, such as China and South-East Asia. For most of that period, growth in Africa was slower than growth in the West, despite the fact that catch-up growth is much easier. Indeed, sub-Saharan Africa continues to fall further behind China (growth rate of 4.24% versus 7.7%, both for 2013) despite the fact that catch-up growth should favour Africa.
This is not obvious to me; should it be? If so, why?
(It seems to me that a lot of the factors that could make a country extremely poor would also make it harder for it to improve. A few examples: Shortage of natural resources; severe internal conflicts; endemic corruption; absent or badly deficient infrastructure; cultural traditions hostile to education, trade, etc. Or, to take an example I suspect you will find more likely than I do to be a large part of the picture, genetically-based mental inferiority.)
You might hope that a country that’s further behind can be helped along by relatively cheap low-hanging fruit that other countries have already picked—e.g., if even the most basic infrastructure is lacking, then provide the cheap most-basic infrastructure. But (1) the long history of roughly exponential economic growth suggests that actually returns may as well be accelerating as diminishing, and (2) if a country lacks even the most basic infrastructure that everyone else has had for ages, that’s probably because something makes it harder to get that infrastructure in place there than elsewhere.
growth rate of 4.24% versus 7.7%, both for 2013
That’s a nice cherry-picked statistic.
Some pages at the World Bank website list recent and (predicted) near-future GDP growth figures for various regions. Indeed, “Sub-Saharan Africa” comes out behind “East Asia and Pacific” (including China, but several other countries in that region have similar figures) -- but ahead of “Europe and Central Asia”, “Latin America and the Caribbean” and “Middle East and North Africa”, and a little behind “South Asia”. (That’s the complete list of regions there. In every case it’s specifically the lower-income countries that they’re looking at, which I guess is why e.g. there’s no “North America” category.)
Sub-Saharan Africa seems to be improving reasonably fast, as troubled regions of the world go. In particular, I’m not seeing evidence that it’s doing so badly as to discredit the idea of trying to help it out.
Yes, catch-up growth is easier—there are lots of studies. The reason is a combination of several things like starting from a low base and not needing to discover anything: all you need to do is implement well-known technologies and policies.
This should not mean that generating growth is easy for undeveloped countries—lots of them are unable to. But those countries which manage to get to a lift-off and into a positive feedback loop do generate very high catch-up growth rates for a period of time. The obvious current example is China.
In absolute terms, conditions in sub-Saharan Africa have improved a lot. Saying “poorest” only states that it hasn’t caught up with the rest of the world, which is also improving.
That’s true. But conditions in sub-Saharan Africa have improved by a lot less than in other regions that were extremely poor 50 years ago, such as China and South-East Asia. For most of that period, growth in Africa was slower than growth in the West, despite the fact that catch-up growth is much easier. Indeed, sub-Saharan Africa continues to fall further behind China (growth rate of 4.24% versus 7.7%, both for 2013) despite the fact that catch-up growth should favour Africa.
This is not a success story.
This is not obvious to me; should it be? If so, why?
(It seems to me that a lot of the factors that could make a country extremely poor would also make it harder for it to improve. A few examples: Shortage of natural resources; severe internal conflicts; endemic corruption; absent or badly deficient infrastructure; cultural traditions hostile to education, trade, etc. Or, to take an example I suspect you will find more likely than I do to be a large part of the picture, genetically-based mental inferiority.)
You might hope that a country that’s further behind can be helped along by relatively cheap low-hanging fruit that other countries have already picked—e.g., if even the most basic infrastructure is lacking, then provide the cheap most-basic infrastructure. But (1) the long history of roughly exponential economic growth suggests that actually returns may as well be accelerating as diminishing, and (2) if a country lacks even the most basic infrastructure that everyone else has had for ages, that’s probably because something makes it harder to get that infrastructure in place there than elsewhere.
That’s a nice cherry-picked statistic.
Some pages at the World Bank website list recent and (predicted) near-future GDP growth figures for various regions. Indeed, “Sub-Saharan Africa” comes out behind “East Asia and Pacific” (including China, but several other countries in that region have similar figures) -- but ahead of “Europe and Central Asia”, “Latin America and the Caribbean” and “Middle East and North Africa”, and a little behind “South Asia”. (That’s the complete list of regions there. In every case it’s specifically the lower-income countries that they’re looking at, which I guess is why e.g. there’s no “North America” category.)
Sub-Saharan Africa seems to be improving reasonably fast, as troubled regions of the world go. In particular, I’m not seeing evidence that it’s doing so badly as to discredit the idea of trying to help it out.
Yes, catch-up growth is easier—there are lots of studies. The reason is a combination of several things like starting from a low base and not needing to discover anything: all you need to do is implement well-known technologies and policies.
This should not mean that generating growth is easy for undeveloped countries—lots of them are unable to. But those countries which manage to get to a lift-off and into a positive feedback loop do generate very high catch-up growth rates for a period of time. The obvious current example is China.