On the other hand the Wuhan coronavirus may be offering one last opportunity for Africa to become part of worldwide supply chains at a level other than that of the extractive industries.
Here's some background from Delancey Place:
Today's selection -- from Africa Since 1940 by Frederick Cooper. Why Africa has found it so difficult to industrialize:
"The cure for a colonial economy dependent on sales of a narrow range of agricultural or mineral products and on purchase from outside of manufactured goods seemed -- to economists and political leaders in the 1950s and 1960s -- to be industrialization. It didn't work out so simply.The analysis is a bit dated, the book was published in 2002, but it is very interesting how much of this still holds up. And dated or not, catching money in motion, in this case in the form of supply chains is always an opportunity.
"Africa has long had great difficulty in attracting capital, given its spreadout population divided by colonial and post-colonial borders, the continent's generally low income levels, and the uncertainties of labor force development among people whose long and bitter experience encouraged them to avoid subordination to an employer by keeping other options open. The mining industry -- in gold, copper, and other minerals -- has been the biggest exception, but only in South Africa and, to an extent, in Southern Rhodesia did it spawn broad regional industrial development. Even in the early 1950s, French and British officials were noticing that private overseas investment was not following in the wake of their public development investments. African political leaders thought that independence would make a decisive difference; they could build their own industries.
"And to an extent they did. States used tariff barriers, taxing imported finished products heavily and inputs lightly, to get investors to manufacture products within their borders. Much investment in the 1960s was import substitution industrialization (ISI), relying on transnational corporations headquartered in the United States, Europe, and Japan. States also founded parastatal corporations in sectors that they hoped would stimulate a wide range of private activity or else built industries that they hoped would constitute the core of a socialist economy. But in either case, the constraints were severe: industry demands technical knowledge as well as finance, and that is highly concentrated in the world economy. Transnational companies often bargained to keep competitors out, and state-owned industries were given protected markets, so that ISI usually meant that producers were sheltered and inefficient, and that citizens were stuck with products more expensive and of lower quality than available on the world market. Continual importation of machinery and supplies was necessary for industry to function. The economics of industrialization in countries with small markets and little infrastructure were bad enough; the politics were worse, for politicians were tempted to use protected industries to enrich themselves and their clients and to distribute relatively well paying jobs....MUCH MORE
Recently:
"Agriculture in Africa will rise to $1 trillion"
Spears' Magazine on Africa
And a few of our prior posts
January 2020
"African economies will outperform global growth in 2020 despite a lag from its biggest countries"
October 2017
Needed: 800 Million Jobs For Africa
By now most of our readers have seen a version of the U.N. projections for world population in 2050 and 2100. If not, here's a post from April with the graphic:
IMF: Sub-Saharan Africa has Just Completed One of its Best Decades of Growth--It's Not Enough (UPDATED)
Update below.
Original post:
This may be one of the more important graphics you are likely to come across today.
Africa's population is projected by the United Nations to reach 2 billion people by 2045, 4 billion before the end of the century:
We followed up with "To Jumpstart Development, Should We Give Africa Bonds a Whirl?"
The problem, as always, is keeping the money from sticking to the hands of the kleptocrats,And today it's the population analysts at Populyst, September 28:
And whether investment will actually do any good.
Following on "IMF: Sub-Saharan Africa has Just Completed One of its Best Decades of Growth--It's Not Enough" here are a couple women who have thought about this stuff, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala a former two-time Finance Minister of Nigeria and World Bank Managing Director, currently a senior advisor at Lazard and Nancy Birdsall, former EVP at the Inter-American Development Bank where she ran a $30 billion loan portfolio....
Africa: 800 Million Jobs Needed
African economies are in a race to get ahead of the demographic boom.....MORE
Up to 500 Million Sub-Saharan Africans Would Like to Move to Europe; Mayfair, Monte Carlo Favored
