Can Africa Claim the 21 st Century? [...]... facilitate African ownership of its development agenda It also remains to be seen how far partnerships can extend beyond assistance, to include enhanced opening of world markets to African products and services Reducing aid dependence and strengthening partnerships will have to be a fourth component of Africa s development strategy 5 CHAPTER 1 Can Africa Claim the 21st Century? S AFRICA (AFRICA) ENTERED THE. .. change in the Bretton Woods institutions the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, widely seen as the main external architects of Africa s economic policies This report selects a number of areas that seem important in answering the question of whether Africa can claim the 21st century It brings together the implications of this recent body of work—particularly that emanating from Africa It... Tavodjre Sections of the report were also discussed in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at seminars with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the Organization of African Unity, and in Johannesburg, South Africa, as part of a conference organized by the Trade and Industrial Policy Secretariat The final dissemination of the report occurred at the May 2000 annual meeting of the African Development Bank... remains with the Steering Committee of this project Although the collaborating institutions endorse the main messages of the report, it does not necessarily reflect the official views of these institutions or of their boards of directors or affiliated institutions xiv Summary D ESPITE GAINS IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1990S, Sub-Saharan Africa (Africa) enters the 21st century with many of the world’s... of GDP in the 1990s, the savings rate of the typical African country has been the lowest in the world Rapid population growth and environmental degradation compound the low savings Estimates of genuine domestic savings (Hamilton and Clemens 1999), which capture the effects of resource depletion, are just 3 percent for Africa (see table 1.1) This is far below the genuine savings rates for other regions,... services—and from the power to influence the allocation of resources Malaria typifies the tendency of many formerly global problems of basic development to have become mainly African At the turn of the 20th century, Africa saw 223 deaths a year from malaria per 100,000 people, only slightly more than other developing regions By 1970 the rate had fallen to 107 in Africa, compared with only 7 in other regions... Affiong Southey, John Strauss, Gabre Michael Woldu, and Kelly Zidana The first draft of the report was discussed in December 1999 at two workshops hosted by the African Economic Research Consortium in Nairobi, Kenya The first workshop solicited views from African stakeholders (practitioners and policymakers); the second gathered comments from researchers Useful discussions and able moderation at the meetings... accelerated in the world’s major centers (Maddison, cited in Bloom and Sachs 1998) African growth may have approximated that in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, and many countries performed well until the oil shock in 1973 But thereafter, Africa again fell behind, with most countries experiencing a steep economic decline that ended only with the recovery of the late 1990s T THE START OF THE TH... allow for Africa s higher costs, investment rates are a third lower in Africa than in other regions (Hoeffler 1999) Part of the reason for slow growth, then, is the fact that investment tends to be more costly in Africa than in other regions For example, trucks in Southern and East Africa cost about twice as much as in Asia These higher costs reflect outside factors as well as taxes and other policies... access to the information economy Africa trails the world on every dimension of these essentials Lowering these barriers requires new approaches, including more participation by the private sector and by local communities, a more regional approach to overcome the problems posed by small African economies, and a central government shift to regulating and facilitating services rather than providing them Though . Can Africa Claim the 21 st Century?