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ID:
163394
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| Summary/Abstract |
Sub-Saharan Africa’s recent economic boom has raised hopes and expectations to lift the regions’ ‘bottom millions’ out of poverty by 2030. How realistic is that goal? We approach this question by comparing the experiences of three front-runners of region-specific development trajectories – Britain’s capital-intensive, Japan’s labour-intensive, and Ghana’s land-extensive growth path, highlighting some historical analogies that are relevant for Africa, but often overlooked in the current ‘Africa rising’ debate. We draw particular attention to Africa’s demographic boom and the possibilities for a quick transition to labour-intensive export-led industrialization. Although our exercise in diachronic comparative history offers little hope for poverty eradication by 2030, we do see broadened opportunities for sustained African economic growth in the longer term.
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| 2 |
ID:
191635
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| Summary/Abstract |
While current levels of economic inequality in Africa receive ample attention from academics and policymakers, we know little about the long-run evolution of inequality in the region. Even the new and influential ‘global inequality literature’ that is associated with scholars like Thomas Piketty, Branko Milanovic, and Walter Scheidel has had little to say about Africa so far. This paper is a first effort to fill that void. Building on recent research in African economic history and utilizing the new theoretical frameworks of the global inequality literature, we chart the long-run patterns and drivers of inequality in Africa from the slave trades to the present. Our analysis dismantles mainstream narratives about the colonial roots of persistent high inequality in post-colonial Africa and shows that existing inequality concepts and theories need further calibration to account, among others, for the role of African slavery in the long-run emergence and vanishing of inequality regimes.
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| 3 |
ID:
076292
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