It has reduced its extreme-poverty rate from 84 per cent to just 10 per cent in 33 years.42
Poverty rates have declined during the last 30 years, in large part, because growth in developing countries rose from an average annual rate of 4.3 per cent from 1960 until 2000 to 6 per cent between 2000 and 2010. It is estimated that around two-thirds of poverty reduction has been a result of growth.
But there is also widespread international recognition and support for the need to go much further, as highlighted by the adoption, on 25 September 2015, by the UN General Assembly of 17 ‘aspirational’ Sustainable Development Goals, the successors to the Millennium Development Goals.43 The extent of poverty in Africa is brought into sharper focus, too, as is noted above, by increasing urbanisation across the continent, where dearth and excess exist in close proximity, and by concerns about the rising inequality worldwide between generations. Whereas, in the past, subsequent generations had an expectation of higher incomes than those born earlier, this may no longer be the case.
Indeed, we do not for one moment underestimate the challenges that African governments face in promoting growth and reducing poverty. The book will, in some detail, describe the very hard choices that African leaders will need to make to change many of the standard operating practices that have developed during the half century or since the independence of most African countries.
At the same time, studies of developing countries worldwide illustrate the need for sustained efforts at promoting governance for extraordinary economic change. In the 1950s, for example, economic development in East Asia was thought to be a difficult, perhaps impossible, task, not least because of so-called ‘cultural’ aspects, including Confucianism. China for many years was similarly seen as hopeless.
Although no country or region is a complete analogue to any other, the East Asian experience does illustrate the astonishing results that a determined government can deliver.
Singapore, which obtained its independence in 1965, a year after Zambia, illustrates a tale of two countries and continents. Zambia’s per capita income in 2016 was, at $1 000, just over three times greater than at independence in 1964; Singapore’s GDP per capita at $56 284 was over 50 times more than it was in 1965. It is difficult to think of contemporary Singapore as a fragile, poor backwater. Yet it was born in crisis out of the separation of the Malay Federation, amid the konfrontasi44 with Indonesia, and riven with multiracial, ethnic and religious sensitivities and differences. While the state under Lee Kuan Yew was at the helm of this transformation, its actions were always guided by commercial principles, and balanced by a devolution of power and shared responsibility among fellow ‘founding fathers’.45
Much can be learnt about Africa’s prospects from what Singapore has accomplished. Despite many opportunities, however, the lessons from this and similar transformations have not been grasped.
Ironically, Africa appeared to go in the opposite direction. ‘In 1968,’ recalls the former prime minister of Kenya Raila Odinga, ‘a team of Singaporeans came to Kenya to learn our lessons, since we were then a more developed country than they were.’ Forty years later, Odinga says, ‘As prime minister, I took a study trip to Singapore with six ministers. That was the latest in many trips taken by the Kenyan government, about which no report was ever written, and where the participants kept everything to themselves. I said that this trip had to be different, that we had to translate our findings into actions. On our return, I asked for a plan of action from each minister on the basis of what they had learnt from Singapore, since there was no point in reinventing the wheel. Each minister was tasked to prepare their action plan against our Vision 2030.’ But after he left government in 2013, Odinga depressingly observes, ‘nothing further happened’.46
Figure 4: East Asia and Africa compared: 50 years of per capita income (in 2005 $), 1960–2013
Source: World Bank national accounts data and OECD national accounts data files, http://databank.worldbank.org/data/reports.aspx?source=world-development-indicators&preview=on#
Yet East Asia seemed to have few advantages over Africa at the point of decolonisation. Traditional East Asian societies were often characterised by ethnic disunity, frail institutions and limited governance outside of the capital, weak democracy, subsistence agriculture, fragmentary external trade linkages and acute social stratification. These conditions were prevalent, too, in many African states.47 Both continents shared a history of colonial (and commodity) exploitation, where the conquerors were sharply divided from the conquered by race, though there was a tendency on the part of the colonial rulers to favour some local groups over others. And in both continents settlers were imposed on the local groups, arousing intense hostility.48 This left them not only with unnatural borders and poor terms of trade, but their people were also left with a devalued sense of their own worth, angry with outsiders yet lacking confidence in their own abilities and suspicious of their fellow country people.
Yet the East Asia region has prospered. As Barack Obama observed during his first visit to the African continent as American president in July 2009,49 colonialism alone does not explain the tribalism, patronage, nepotism, corruption and self-destructive policies that have caused the continent’s development to slip so far behind its people’s needs and its peers in other regions.
While most East Asian countries had to accept a complex ethnic make-up as a result of colonial involvement, as with Africa, this has not in most cases resulted in endemic instability. East Asia, too, has had to cope with underdeveloped human capital, yet its states have, by and large, quickly turned their people into an asset through investment in education. While Africa’s institutional capacity is cited as a structural developmental impediment, some countries in South East Asia have grown economically with institutions at independence far worse resourced than those in African countries.
In fact, in some respects, African countries were better off than their Asian counterparts at independence. Few African countries, after all, can claim the bitter cost and devastation wrought by the scale of conflict in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
Despite the contemporary fad to bash aid as the explanation for all of Africa’s problems,50 Asian countries have also received comparatively large amounts of donor assistance. During the 1960s, aid per capita received by both regions was similar. Whereas some Asian countries enjoyed especially large aid flows (such as South Korea and Taiwan), and continue to do so (Vietnam), they did not allow themselves to become dependent on this single source of income. Asian countries have put aid to good use, because of improved governance, sound polices, effective planning and clearer, firmer local ownership of projects.51
East Asian states that attempted top-down, centrally planned economic control and development were a disaster, just as the model has, too, proven a disaster in those African and other nations that have tried to take this path, no matter how intellectually coherent and tempting it might have been to the postcolonial leadership. Both regions suffered from characteristic problems of socialist gigantism and exploitation. However, those Asian countries – China, Cambodia and Vietnam, for example – that moved off this system immediately prospered.
A better policy environment also helps to explain why some East Asian countries have used their significant natural-resource endowment to their advantage (Vietnam, again, or Malaysia, for example) without becoming overly locked into natural-resource production and hence vulnerable to price fluctuations.
The difference in development results between East Asia and Africa does not originate either in political systems, even though, for some, East Asia’s development success has been used to justify authoritarianism, given that the region’s economies have managed high economic growth rates without conferring full political rights on its citizens.
Democracy and development
Given
