Book Review: Africa at the Crossroads by Riccardo Pelizzo

Salvatore Babones

Book Review, Americas

Africa boosters want to believe that the continent’s day has come. The hard data suggests otherwise.

In the last half-century, sub-Saharan Africa has grown from a sparsely populated region of 250 million people spread over an area the size of the United States, Mexico, and Canada combined into an increasingly urbanized region of more than one billion people. Though still less crowded than behemoths like India and China, sub-Saharan Africa’s fertility rate of five children per women is double that of India and four times that of China. And the population will almost certainly double again by mid-century, after which it is anyone’s guess as to when (or if) Africa’s population growth will finally slow down.

Africa specialists like Riccardo Pelizzo, writing in Africa at the Crossroads, are keen to convince the world that the economies of sub-Saharan Africa are also booming, but here the case is not so clear. Pelizzo points out that many economies in sub-Saharan Africa have seen sustained growth of 3.5 percent or more over a period of fifteen years, but that seems paltry compared to the numbers being racked up in Asia. With populations expanding at 2.5 percent annually, 3.5 percent economic growth just isn’t that impressive. And then there are the periodic busts.

Asian countries like India and Vietnam—to say nothing of China—have managed three decades of consistent growth ever since liberalizing their economies in the early 1990s. In fact, what growth Africa has experienced in recent years seems to have been driven mainly by Asian demand for African commodities. And the one sub-Saharan African country that has managed substantial manufacturing growth, Ethiopia, has done so through Chinese strategic investment. Sub-Saharan Africa may no longer be suffering periodic famines (except in areas affected by civil war), but it is hardly a model of development.