Ruchir Sharma’s column (Opinion, December 18) misses the real challenge confronting African and other low and middle-income economies around the world — that of how to achieve accelerating productivity growth to enable convergence with advanced economies.
Although the notion that African countries have failed to harness the continent’s population boom by increasing labour productivity is a reasonable point, Africa’s slow productivity growth is a common affliction in dozens of countries across Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.
In explaining how Africa has not capitalised on population growth, he compares South Korea and Taiwan, which in the 1960s were at par with several African countries. Yet this comparison is superficial. South Korea and Taiwan’s feat — alongside the rest of the Asian Tigers — in converging with high-income economies is distinct even within east Asia. Their mostly lower middle-income neighbours — Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar, Laos, the Philippines and Vietnam, all with gross national income of less than $5,000 per capita — are on a similar catch-up quest as African countries, to raise their total factor productivity.
Thus, the challenge of accelerating productivity growth is not a uniquely African problem. According to an IMF working paper, over the 1960-2014 period, only 16 out of 182 countries reached high-income status. Take out the Asian Tigers and the oil-rich Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE and the number of countries that sustained high levels of per capita income growth rates drops to less than 10 countries around the world.
Africa must urgently prioritise policies to accelerate productivity growth to raise incomes and reduce poverty, a task that, in the best of times, will be hard to accomplish for the region’s leaders.
Zainab Usman
Founding Director, Africa Programme, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, US
