Publication: Reinvigorating Growth in Resource-Rich Sub-Saharan Africa
Date
2018-09
ISSN
Published
2018-09
Author(s)
Abstract
The strong economic performance of
Sub-Saharan Africa’s resource-rich countries since the start
of the 21st century has been celebrated as a return to more
buoyant growth and renewed convergence with the advanced
economies.Despite the recent progress in improving living
standards and reducing poverty, achieving high and
sustainable growth continues to be the main challenge for
policymakers.Rwanda and Ethiopia have led Sub-Saharan Africa
(SSA) in terms of per-capita growth since 2000, growing
faster than South Asia. However, the gap between the
resource-rich countries of Africa with East Asia and the
Pacific (EAP), SAR, and the advanced economies has widened
since 2010, underlining the difficulty of accelerating
growth.Africa has often been portrayed as a continent of
boundless natural riches that have helped pull the whole
subcontinent forward. Indeed, resource-rich Africa accounts
for a dominant part of SSA’s economy. Resource-rich SSA
accounts for 70 percent of both the subcontinent’s GDP and
physical capital, 60 percent of its natural capital, and
nearly 40 percent of its population. For the continent in
aggregate and in per capita terms, however, natural
resources are just a bit higher than in the South Asia
Region (SAR) and lag all other developing regions.One way of
thinking of strengthening economic growth depends on more
exploration and development of natural resources that should
help increase the continent’s natural wealth, as has
happened in many other developing regions.More importantly,
durable prosperity in resource-rich Africa depends on
building up the assets, or components of overall wealth,
that are in relatively short supply. In recent years, the
literature has started to focus on assets and assets
diversification as a path to development, and the World Bank
has led in this area. In this report, we emphasize the two
complementary types of assets that Africa’s resource-rich
countries need to build up to accelerate growth: one is
within national borders and the other across borders.
Citation
“Izvorski, Ivailo; Coulibaly, Souleymane; Doumbia, Djeneba. 2018. Reinvigorating Growth in Resource-Rich Sub-Saharan Africa; Reinvigorating Growth in Resource-Rich Sub-Saharan Africa. © World Bank, Washington, DC. http://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/30399 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”