Africa at a Turning Point? : Growth, Aid, and External Shocks
This book is a collection of essays that seeks to answer three interrelated sets of questions about Africa's recent growth recovery. The first set of essays addresses questions about the drivers and durability of Africa's growth. How different is current economic performance compared to Africa's long history of boom-bust cycles? Have African countries learned to avoid past mistakes and pursued the right policies? How much of the current performance depends on good luck such as favorable commodity prices or the recovery of external assistance and how much depends on hard-won economic policy reforms. A second set of essays looks at the role of donor flows. External assistance plays a larger role in Africa's growth story than in any other part of the developing world. As a result, the economic management of external assistance is a major public policy challenge, and donor behavior is a significant source of external risk. The third set of essays looks at questions arising from commodity price shocks especially from changes in the price of oil. Relative to factors such as policy failures, conflicts, and natural disasters, how important are commodity price shocks in explaining output variability in African countries? Compared to the oil price shocks in the 1970s, why have recent higher oil prices apparently had less impact on Africa's growth? Oil is also now an important source of revenue for several oil exporting countries in Africa; what are the economic challenges faced by those countries? How should one analyze the macroeconomic and distributional impact of external and oil price shocks? As the essays in this volume show, laying the policy and institutional basis for longer-term growth, managing volatile commodity prices and aid flows, and turning growth in average incomes into growth in all incomes remain formidable but manageable challenges if Africa is to reach its turning point.
| Summary: | This book is a collection of essays that
seeks to answer three interrelated sets of questions about
Africa's recent growth recovery. The first set of
essays addresses questions about the drivers and durability
of Africa's growth. How different is current economic
performance compared to Africa's long history of
boom-bust cycles? Have African countries learned to avoid
past mistakes and pursued the right policies? How much of
the current performance depends on good luck such as
favorable commodity prices or the recovery of external
assistance and how much depends on hard-won economic policy
reforms. A second set of essays looks at the role of donor
flows. External assistance plays a larger role in
Africa's growth story than in any other part of the
developing world. As a result, the economic management of
external assistance is a major public policy challenge, and
donor behavior is a significant source of external risk. The
third set of essays looks at questions arising from
commodity price shocks especially from changes in the price
of oil. Relative to factors such as policy failures,
conflicts, and natural disasters, how important are
commodity price shocks in explaining output variability in
African countries? Compared to the oil price shocks in the
1970s, why have recent higher oil prices apparently had less
impact on Africa's growth? Oil is also now an important
source of revenue for several oil exporting countries in
Africa; what are the economic challenges faced by those
countries? How should one analyze the macroeconomic and
distributional impact of external and oil price shocks? As
the essays in this volume show, laying the policy and
institutional basis for longer-term growth, managing
volatile commodity prices and aid flows, and turning growth
in average incomes into growth in all incomes remain
formidable but manageable challenges if Africa is to reach
its turning point. |
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