Explaining Africa’s Recent Economic Growth Experiences

Abstract

I have earlier indicated that sustained economic development has eluded nearly all SSA countries for much of their post-independence history. This weak economic performance has been well documented in the development economics literature (see, e.g., Fosu and O’Connell, 2000; Hoeffler, 2002; Tahari et al., 2004). These previous studies have primarily attributed the growth failures to wrong economic policies and undue state interventions. Their explanations have provided a justification for the World Bank and the IMF-sponsored structural adjustment reform programmes, implemented in the 1980s and 1990s, aimed at rolling back state involvement in the economies and thereby also reducing its negative side effects such as the emergence of cronies and rent-seeking cultures within the administrative hierarchies.