Читать книгу Economics of G20 - Группа авторов - Страница 24

Economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has lagged behind that in other regions over the past half century (1965–2016). The actual performance can be contrasted with its potential. Many analysts have rated its potential for growth very highly. A key question thus arises as to why the region has performed so poorly.¹ A major reason that has been advanced is poor governance, which manifests in the form of high levels of political instability and civil unrest because of an extremely fractured society with many cleavages.² SSA has a large number of least developed countries (LDCs) as defined by the United Nations (UN) and also most of the failed fragile states as defined by the United Kingdom’s aid agency, the Department for International Development (DFID). The UN lists 48 countries as LDCs, and SSA contains 33 of these.³ However, there is no conclusive evidence that the LDCs have performed more poorly than those considered more developed or that the fragile states have performed more poorly. In the following section, we note briefly that Africa has performed more poorly than other regions. The low rate of growth of per capita income is accompanied by low levels of investment. Also, the African countries have not benefitted from their greater integration with the world economy. They have a high share of exports in GDP, but this has increased very slowly. We distinguish countries by the nature of commodities that dominate their export basket.

In the third section, we further study performance in terms of export orientation. This analysis concludes that the weakest performance is by exporters of manufactures. Furthermore, we find that the performance of African countries seems to be influenced considerably by international factors. It is therefore important that the system of international economic governance including the The list also has a footnote that says General Assembly resolution 68/L.20 adopted on December 4, 2013, decided that Equatorial Guinea will graduate three and a half years after the adoption of the resolution and that Vanuatu will graduate 4 years after the adoption of the resolution. UNCTAD prepares an annual report on the LDCs. We have used the 2011 Report. G20 must seek to raise the growth rate of GDP in the developed countries, reform the institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to increase the voice of developing countries and reverse the trend of the declining importance of aid.

We also compare the performance of countries in Latin America (LA) with those in SSA by export orientation. Countries in SSA have grown more slowly than those in LA even when the export orientation was similar. However, the increase in share of exports of goods and services (XGS) in GDP and of gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) in GDP has generally been greater in SSA when countries with similar export orientation are compared. The final section has the conclusions from our analysis.