Is It Africa's Turn?
A forum on progress in the world's poorest region
Christopher Herwig/herwigphoto.com
Edward Miguel
"When I visited last June, the city was experiencing an economic renaissance. Busia’s first supermarkets, ATMs, Internet cafés and car rental businesses were all open, and residential suburbs had formed on the edge of town. . . Yet, barely a decade ago, poverty and desperation were pervasive there, as in all of western Kenya."
Robert Bates
"Miguel overlooks some reasons for Africa’s new prosperity. And I am more skeptical than he concerning the stability of Africa’s politics and the quality of its governance."
Ken Banks
" African entrepreneurs are discovering that the current technological environment enables them to remove those shackles for themselves. They need not rely on a donor agency or international trade agreement to hand them the key."
Olu Ajakaiye
"The proposition that if the economic growth of the last seven years continues for another decade or two African economies will be richer and more diversified and thus less at risk of falling into conflict has the feel of mutatis mutandis."
Rosamond Naylor
". . . any discussion about a sustained turnaround for the region must consider the rural sector . . . There is no clearer evidence of the fragility of sub-Saharan Africa’s economic progress than the current global food crisis."
David N. Weil
"Rapid population growth raises the stakes for African governments . . . The most obvious dimension is food. Africa already skates along the edge of food shortage."
Jeremy M. Weinstein
"Most African countries today hold regular elections . . . Yet it has been frustratingly difficult for social scientists to find robust evidence of democracy’s economic dividends."
Smita Singh
"Elections in and of themselves need not force leaders to be responsive to the public good; electoral competition can drive political parties into patronage instead."
Paul Collier
"There is a process at work that does not depend on democracy and is so simple that analysts generally miss it: learning from mistakes."
View Collier's recent TED Talk about third world development.
Rachel Glennerster
"Before we get carried away about Chinese investment it is worth noting that the entire stock of Chinese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Africa in 2005 was just one tenth of the flow of new FDI from the United Kingdom into Africa the previous year."
Miguel responds
"A learning agenda is the key to Africa's economic future . . . With impact-evaluation results in hand, policymakers in poor countries will increasingly be able to rely on hard evidence when deciding how to use their scarce resources."
