Future Development Reads: The brittle consensus on Africa’s prospects

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Seventeen years ago, The Economist called Africa the hopeless continent. A decade later it ate its words, and popularized a new slogan: Africa rising. In 2013, to erase any doubts about its opinion about Africa, the magazine headlined its special report, A hopeful continent. 

Optimism has pervaded prognostications about Africa for more than a decade. In 2014, this was the title of an article about the International Monetary Fund’s  World Economic Outlook: The IMF says the World is in a Mess – But Not Africa. In his 2015 book, economist Steve Radelet pointed out that Africa is less poor, less sick, better educated, and better governed than ever before; incomes and investment are rising, debt and inflation are down, and civil conflict is subsiding. In 2016, McKinsey doubled down, ignoring rumors that the continent’s largest economy, Nigeria, would need help from the IMF and the World Bank, it declared Africa’s economic fundamentals strong. 


The IMF and the World Bank are putting on a brave face. Last September, the IMF forecast Africa’s growth at less than 2 percent, highlighting that several countries were expected to grow at about 6 percent before allowing that the region’s three biggest economies—Nigeria, South Africa, and Angola—would do really badly. A month later, an article in The New York Times figured that “Africa Reeling” would be a better headline for the region. But in April 2017, the World Bank exclaimed that economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa is projected to rebound (wait for this…) 2.6 percent in 2017. The population in Africa grows by about 2.7 percent every year.
You can get whiplash reading this stuff.
African Drama
The real action is in Asia. Kenan Karakülah, my colleague here at the Duke Center for International Development, made Figure 1 using data for 1960-2016 from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators. Back in 1960, East Asia and Africa had pretty much the same ...

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