Resource curse? Trade, Growth and Development. 13/02/2012 at 6:19 pm By Hans Zomer Earlier this year, the European Commission launched a new 10-year strategy, entitled ‘Trade, Growth and Development’. The strategy reflects a wider trend among aid donors, who have come to realise that overseas aid on its own is not going to be sufficient to promote economic growth. In a move that evokes much of the aid discourse from the 1970s, many donors point to the rapid economic development in Asian countries to explain why they now embrace “the market” as a key tool to combat poverty. “The rise of emerging economies like India, China and Brazil shows that trade-driven development is possible and that open markets can play a major role in generating growth” said the EU’s Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht. There are many good reasons to re-think the EU’s aid and trade policies. Development NGOs have long argued that aid alone will not end extreme poverty. If the EU’s new strategy aims to redress the balance, then it is a welcome initiative.
People must rank ahead of profit in African mining - The Irish Times - Mon, Feb 27. What's driving Africa's growth - McKinsey Quarterly - Economic Studies - Productivity & Performance. Africa’s economic pulse has quickened, infusing the continent with a new commercial vibrancy. Real GDP rose by 4.9 percent a year from 2000 through 2008, more than twice its pace in the 1980s and ’90s. Telecommunications, banking, and retailing are flourishing. Construction is booming. Private-investment inflows are surging. To be sure, many of Africa’s 50-plus individual economies face serious challenges, including poverty, disease, and high infant mortality. Yet Africa’s collective GDP, at $1.6 trillion in 2008, is now roughly equal to Brazil’s or Russia’s, and the continent is among the world’s most rapidly growing economic regions.
This acceleration is a sign of hard-earned progress and promise. While Africa’s increased economic momentum is widely recognized, its sources and likely staying power are less understood. Each African country will follow its own growth path. More than a resource boom To be sure, Africa has benefited from the surge in commodity prices over the past decade.
Africa's Amazing Rise and What it Can Teach the World - Atlantic Mobile. Ten years into the continent's quiet revolution, lessons for the developing world A construction worker walks on scaffolding on a tunnel project under construction near the Kenyan capital, Nairobi / Reuters The poverty mafia once controlled the development debate in Africa. No longer. The old approach was about how to prevent Africa from getting poorer. The new thinking on development is to share Africa's wealth more equitably. In 2000, when I first visited Sub-Saharan Africa, to report on the civil war in Burundi, the international community was preparing itself for a new round of development failures. Yet at that same moment when leading development thinkers saw the most modest of futures for the sub-Saharan as a region, a diverse group of determined African technocrats -- from Ghana to Uganda, Zambia to Kenya, South Africa to Rwanda -- joined forces with technologically savvy, globally oriented capitalists to launch a quiet revolution in development thinking.
What changed? No longer. International - Howard W. French - The Next Asia Is Africa: Inside the Continent's Rapid Economic Growth. As African economies grow, its societies are changing as well. Zambians gather to welcome home the national soccer team in Lusaka. (AP) LUSAKA, Zambia -- The teenagers started arriving at the Arcades outdoor shopping center here just as the sun began to set. They took over the parking lot first, then the sidewalks. Within half an hour, the strutting and preening groups occupied just about every available pedestrian space. Joshua Banda, a 15-year-old who wore green Converse All Stars with matching laces, sat with two friends at the edge of a gurgling fountain, surveying the crowds of girls.
Joshua's parents moved to a Lusaka shanty when he was small. The new mall culture in Zambia's capital, which I've watched expand almost exponentially in visits over the last three years, is booming all over Africa, in places like Accra and Dakar, Windhoek and Gaborone, Nairobi and Maputo. Seven of the world's 10 fastest-growing economies are African.