[The Course]
The class “Sub-Saharan Africa” covers the most important aspects of the region’s history and its modern state, which include comparison of the economic growth between SSA and other regions of the world, historical factors, which led SSA to its current situation. The class also describes initial post-colonial conditions providing SSA a range of the opportunities at the beginning of 1960s, economic performance factors. Finally, the reasons of not learning Eastern Asian countries lessons are analyzed and the further regional policy proposals are developed.
Though the Sub-Saharan countries had better preliminaries for sustainable development in the early 1960s than many other countries of the world and intensive economic growth of the region’s economy starting from 2000s, their per capita income today is even lower than in the 1960s. One of the main reason of such instability is that region’s economy is mostly based on the oil and gas trade.
The resource-based character of the economies in the region is the logical result of the region’s history due to its historic long-term isolation from the rest of the world, heavy colonial factor impact as well as labor scarcity and land abundance.
Another important reason of poor success in economic development is the imbalance between high level of African elites’ political power and actual absence of economic power. Even selected cases of extraordinary leaders emerge (like Nelson Mandela) didn’t change the general situation.
The economic policy in the region didn’t have determined strategical approach: the countries shifted from naïve belief in government control over the economy to the strong belief in free market. Both of these extreme approaches didn’t lead to the economic success.
All this led to the paradoxical situation when the Sub-Saharan region is one of the largest regions in the world, but in terms of population it slightly exceeds 50% of Eastern Asia’s population.
As a result, the total SSA’s GDP per capita decreased 1.17% during the period of 1980-1995, and during the following 15 years (1995-2009) the region only managed to compensate the previous decline.
The region didn’t actually show any economic growth despite being the largest recipient of the aid from the developed countries. Sub-Saharan countries paid too high price for ignoring the best practices of successful development.
The most reasonable strategic of economic development of the SSA region is Learning, Industrial and Technology (LIT) Policies, which should be implemented in both agricultural and industrial sector. The successful experience of implementing LIT policy in African states like Ethiopia and Rwanda should be taken into consideration. During the period of 2000-2010 these countries showed annual economy growth of 8.8%, which was second only to the world leader – China. Such results prove the efficiency of LIT policy for African states and provide them with good prospects of future economy growth.
