How Africa Can Work

It seems like every man who has given any thought to Africa, and many who haven’t, has a pet cause for Africa’s perpetual dysfunction, which usually conveniently lines up with his preexisting world view. In How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Developmental Frontier, Joe Studwell provides a refreshingly non-ideological look at what has worked in those African states that have experienced high levels of economic growth in the post-1960 independence era. Identifying Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia, and Rwanda as success stories, the text examines the broader issues in Africa and then focuses on those four states. The conclusion he reaches is that, like the great successes of Asia, the African states which have prospered have generally sought broad-based political support and then largely ignored the advice of “orthodox” economists, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and focused instead on the development of an agricultural economy to create consumer demand, imposed capital controls in their early stages of development, and focused on coherent, government-led development plans. Even for people like me, who know a lot about Africa and think about it all the time, Studwell has done a remarkable job at providing a clear picture of the continent’s problems and giving a realistic but optimistic assessment of what the future may hold in those states where the political leadership manages to maintain focus on successful developmental policies.

The clearest thesis of this text is that, in states that have become affluent, development has followed the same general process. The modern world, however, is “pulling the ladder up” on Africa by applying rules and concerns that our own countries did not have when they were poor. This is a fairly common criticism, and broadly true, but it isn’t always clear what a person means by it. One simple example is countries which got rich off of the energy provided by oil paying African nations not to develop their economy with fossil fuels, due to global carbon concerns. What is freshest about this book is that it avoids moralizing and instead is entirely practical, which is the attitude that needs to be taken towards Africa’s economic problems. 

For example, the book rejects the idea that democracy has any specific association with economic development, instead showing specific successful policy prescriptions that may be provided by any type of government (though he adds that democracy has other, non-economic, positive traits.) Similarly, he explains without moralizing why colonialism wasn’t economically positive for either side when practiced in Africa. Most notably, the text extensively discusses the garment trade as a rare form of low-skill factory work that can successfully be brought into undeveloped countries by outside firms and compete in global markets without subjecting readers to lamentations about “sweatshops.” Even slavery is primarily treated as an economic phenomenon, rather than subjecting the reader to constant admonitions about how slavery is morally bad and abusive towards slaves.