Here is a link to a Reuters Big View podcast about How Africa Works. You can also find it on Spotify and Youtube. And here is a link to Tyler Cowen’s podcast about How Africa Works.
Posts Tagged ‘Demographics’
The Big View podcast and Tyler Cowen’s podcast.
March 3, 2026Key themes in How Africa Works
February 16, 2026Below are links to two articles I wrote for Dragonomics about key themes in How Africa Works. If you want a bit more detail about what is in the book before shelling out your hard-earned, you will find it in these pieces.
How Africa Works, Global Developments review
February 16, 2026Joe Studwell Turns To Africa
Feb 10, 2026
How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Developmental Frontier, by Joe Studwell. Atlantic Monthly Press. 2026.
When Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works came out in 2013, it was a book deeply out of consensus. In an age of randomized control trials and micro-interventions, it resurrected macro policies—land redistribution, industrial policy—that had virtually disappeared from mainstream development economics. Moreover, it returned East Asia, the only developing region in the world to successfully make the postwar climb out of poverty, back to the center of debate.
Thirteen years on, Studwell probably deserves some kind of triumphal march. Industrial policy is back in a big way. Through How Asia Works’s influence on Noah Smith and a host of bloggers, a generation of young tech-adjacent males were primed to rant about semiconductor subsidies at parties.
I am no exception. Reading How Asia Works was a formative intellectual experience for me—a jolt out of the mathematical slumber of PhD coursework. I have a complex relationship with the text (more on this in a moment), but I still recommend it effusively to anyone who wants to learn about East Asia.
Now, thirteen years later, Joe Studwell is back. How Africa Works aims to do for Africa what he achieved for Asia—becoming the natural first stop for readers who want to learn about the economics of the continent.
A Dismal Inheritance
The first part of How Africa Works addresses the perennial question: why is Africa poor?
Historically, low population density, induced by pests like the tse-tse fly, discouraged the formation of large urban centers. The slave trade—first Arab, then Western—further depopulated the continent, breaking down social bonds. When Europeans arrived in force in the 19th century, they did colonialism on the cheap, with few policemen and even fewer schools. (I wrote in depth about this a few months ago.) Unlike (say) the Japanese in Korea or Taiwan, the colonial state rarely penetrated much farther than the capital or key ports, leaving governance in the vast hinterland to invented or upjumped chiefs.
Decolonization left a dismal inheritance. In spite of superficial similarities in GDP with East or South Asia, Africa had far more problems on its plate. Levels of education were far too low to sustain an effective civil service, let alone communities of engineers or innovators. Incoherent states encased in inappropriate borders meant Africa’s founding fathers had to stitch nations together from unrelated ethnic groups.
Studwell’s diagnosis of Africa’s problems is steadfastly conventional, leaning heavily on the academic consensus established by Jeffrey Herbst, Robert Bates, Nicolas van de Walle, Leonard Wantchekon, among others. This is no dig; Studwell is an elegant synthesizer. I have some quibbles around the margins—the underrating of precolonial Africa reflects some lingering Western state-centric bias—but as a diagnosis for Africa’s poverty this is a far richer, textured, and more accurate account than the memelike “extractive institutions”.
Four Success Stories
Having set the scene, Studwell turns to four successful case studies: Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia, and Rwanda. This itself is a refreshing approach to economic analysis of Africa, which so often wants to dwell on failure. Unlike Taiwan or South Korea, none of these countries is an unqualified developmental miracle, but their relative success provides clues to how an African economic transformation might take place.
Botswana
Botswana is Studwell’s poster child for a successful democratic developmental coalition. (For this reason, it featured heavily in Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail as an example of “inclusive institutions”.)
Under the sound leadership of Seretse Khama, local chiefs were carefully co-opted at independence and the Botswana Democratic Party built up into a genuine national force. Khama also created a capable civil service, initially staffed by remaining Europeans, but gradually Africanized with sterling Batswana talent. This meant that when diamonds were discovered just around independence, the windfall was carefully managed, avoiding the worst effects of Dutch Disease. These mining revenues helped raise Botswana to upper middle-income status, making it the fourth-richest country in continental Africa.
Botswana’s chief failing, in Studwell’s view, was adhering too much to responsible policy orthodoxy—i.e., not enough industrial policy. There was no vision for large-scale industrialization, no coherent plan to create large numbers of factory jobs. Moreover, the political dominance of large cattle owners (Botswana was a society of pastoralists rather than farmers) meant that redistribution was never in the cards. The result is a relatively rich society, but one that is highly unequal.
Mauritius
Mauritius, which is often not thought of as an African country, is perhaps the most unusual choice. An uninhabited island before Dutch colonization in the 17th century, its ethnic makeup of Indians and Creoles resembles the Caribbean more than continental Africa. Moreover, Mauritius became independent in 1968 at an income level that most contemporary Africans would envy (see chart above).
Nonetheless, Mauritius’s developmental record is impressive. Originally a sugar colony, a tax on sugar receipts was used to funnel landowners’ capital from agriculture to manufacturing. In the subsequent manufacturing drive, powered by the exports of apparel and textiles, GDP rose 6% a year. With egalitarian, broad-based growth, poverty was virtually eradicated.
However, Mauritius was unable to make the leap from garments to higher-value manufacturing, and the sector’s share of GDP has since halved from over 20 percent to just 11 percent by 2020. Alongside Seychelles, it is one of only two African countries ranked “very high” on the UN’s Human Development Index.
Rwanda
Ethiopia and Rwanda, as recent developmental darlings and conscious emulators of the East Asian example, are perhaps the least surprising inclusions in Studwell’s list.
Under President Paul Kagame, Rwanda has explicitly modeled itself after Singapore (including Lee Kuan Yew’s authoritarian tendencies). At first blush, this struck me as absurd: Singapore is an island state on the crossroads of the world’s richest sea lanes; Rwanda is a landlocked country in poor central Africa.
Studwell’s account convinced me there is an economic logic to this strategy. The high cost of road transport means that importing goods into Central Africa is prohibitively expensive. Rwanda does not necessarily need to compete with the world; by delivering on infrastructure projects and maintaining rare political stability, it can attract investment as a kind of entrepot to Africa’s Great Lakes. Under this formula (with perhaps some slight fudging of the numbers), Rwanda has maintained impressive 7% growth for the past decade.
The big question surrounding Rwanda is if the growth coalition can hold together. Nowhere else in Africa is the tragic legacy of ethnic division more apparent; the present Kagame regime took power by overthrowing the perpetrators of the infamous 1994 genocide. Rwanda’s military involvement in the Eastern Congo, which represents both a source of raw materials and a lucrative market of 30 million, adds a further dark cast to its developmental success.
Ethiopia
It is Ethiopia that comes the closest to achieving all parts of Studwell’s formula. As a country of 135 million people, it has the scale to set a major example to the world and to take a serious bite out of Africa’s poverty all on its own.
Meles Zenawi, prime minister from 1995 to 2012, was an avid student of East Asia. (His thesis outline is available online; for any economist with a wavering faith in the power of ideas, read the bibliography.) Under his leadership, the Ethiopian state invested heavily in agricultural extension and irrigation, improving the yields of smallholder farmers. It began (with Chinese support) building industrial parks to support an export manufacturing base. Most ambitious of all, it began work on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, one of the largest hydropower projects in the world, to find a permanent solution to Ethiopia’s energy woes.
No student of How Asia Works could have done better. Had How Africa Works been published before November 2020, it’s easy to see how a celebration of Ethiopia might have occupied most of the book. But the outbreak of civil war derailed Ethiopia’s progress, demonstrating the continuing risk of ethnic conflict to the prospects of economic growth.
Mashamba Na Viwanda
Unlike East Asia, Africa has no unqualified economic miracles to point to. The result is a book that is more diffuse in its rhetorical impact than How Asia Works, but also one that is perhaps more realistic about the constraints. Some of the swaggering confidence that marked the Asian Triple Growth Formula is gone.
Nonetheless, Studwell insists that universal prescriptions still exist:
… despite the radically different context, I have found that the policies that were most effective in East Asia in producing economic transformation are the same ones that have worked in the handful of cases of early success in Africa. In this respect, there is no African exceptionalism.
As a recap, these policies were smallholder agriculture with state support, industrial policy to support export-led manufacturing, and tight government control of finance to support all these aims. To these three, Studwell adds the extra ingredient of a “developmental political coalition”—taken largely for granted in the relatively homogenous, authoritarian states of East Asia, but far from table stakes in ethnically fractious, democratic Africa.
I’m no expert on any of the four countries Studwell discussed. But let me comment on two of Studwell’s key pillars from an economic lens: agriculture and manufacturing.
Agriculture
Like in How Asia Works, Studwell advocates for smallholder farming in Africa, citing the familiar evidence that small farms grow more crops per acre than big ones. (In jargon, this is the “inverse farm size – yield relationship”.) In theory, then, redistributing land from big landowners to smallholders should improve aggregate productivity.
Smallholder farming may be desirable for political, distributional, or social reasons. In most societies, owning your own plot of land naturally has enormous psychological value. In Kenya, for instance, having a rural shamba is a source of social status and, in urban downturns, acts as a form of social insurance. Regimes that ignore this basic fact invite unrest: the anti-communist regimes of East Asia likely had to do some form of land redistribution or risk being thrown into the sea.
But on the narrow point of efficiency I am more agnostic. I mentioned earlier my complex relationship with How Asia Works; my academic work finds that the major land distributions in Taiwan and Mainland China had smaller yield effects than previously thought. Having pondered this question for years, it now seems to me simplistic to expect there to be a universal Platonic relationship where the smaller the farm, the higher the yields. Far more likely that this relationship depends on the crop, the soil, and the available infrastructure. Wheat yields in Europe, for instance, seem to be the highest on large farms, while rice yields in Asia can grow on tiny plots with the near-endless application of labor.
But on Studwell’s broader theme, of a renewed developmental focus on agriculture, I am in complete agreement. African smallholders, ignored by their states and deprived of support, are struggling. According to the best available data, stretching from 2008 to 2019, both smallholder yields and total factor productivity have been declining by around 3 to 4% a year.1 It’s difficult to envision lifting 460 million Africans out of extreme poverty without improving the meager returns from their primary occupation.
Manufacturing
The other noteworthy component of the Studwellian recipe is a heavy emphasis on growing manufacturing, fostered by state industrial policy.
What’s so special about manufacturing? Studwell leans heavily on an influential 2013 paper by Dani Rodrik, who argues that manufacturing possesses the unique property of “unconditional convergence”. Unlike other sectors, manufacturing in developing countries appears to catch up quickly to the global frontier of productivity. Intuitively, because most manufactured goods are tradable, manufacturing firms are more exposed to the pressure of international competition, forcing them to innovate; moreover, manufacturing processes (compared to, say, crop growing practices) are readily transferrable across borders.
I was long a True Believer in this thesis, but have recently had my faith shaken. New empirical work, forthcoming in the American Economic Review: Insights, suggests that unconditional convergence in manufacturing may partly have been an illusion of the data. (In that paper, somewhat cheekily, it turns out that agriculture and services display convergence, but manufacturing does not.)
Of course, no one’s worldview is really determined by a paper based on a few cross-country regressions. (Even one by Dani Rodrik.) What convinces most is how central manufacturing was to the East Asian miracle, still the only region of the world to ride the escalator up from poverty to riches.
This relates to a deeper problem with the prospects for African industrialization: namely, that industrialization never happens in a vacuum. A successful domestic manufacturing base is a product not only of your own industrial policy, but global market conditions and the strength of your competitors.
One obvious risk is automation, which threatens the manufacturing sector’s absorption of labor, and may help keep Chinese factories globally competitive despite rising wages. Studwell quickly brushes off these concerns (“[the] labour cost in a country like Madagascar is US$65 a month… the cost of an advanced industrial robot in the apparel sector is over US$100,000”). In my view they deserve deeper inspection.
Moreover, even if Studwell’s right, Africa has strong competitors in the race to claim China’s manufacturing share: South and Southeast Asia, with their large urban populations and increasingly capable states. Studwell notes optimistically that Africa has finally caught up to the educational attainment of East Asia in 1960; he fails to note that South and Southeast Asia have long exceeded that level.
A Bias For Hope
Longtime readers of Studwell’s writing—from 2003’s The China Dream to 2013’s How Asia Works to the present volume—will know that he has a strong contrarian streak. The China Dream was notably downbeat about China’s development prospects just as the largest export boom in history was getting started (p. xii: “the economic foundations of contemporary China have been laid on sand and [are] constructed from the kind of hubris that drove the Soviet Union in the 1950s”). How Asia Works was stridently dirigiste, right at the high-water mark of the Neoliberal Age.
By contrast, Studwell sounds unusually optimistic about Africa, where, post-aid cuts, the pendulum of international opinion has swung decisively towards gloom. State-led improvements in health and (to a lesser extent) education, supported in part by international aid, have eroded some of Africa’s historical disadvantages. Most of all, the demographic boon of the world’s youngest population will give growth efforts a brief but powerful tailwind.
As an analysis of what makes countries grow, the Studwellian formula is of course incomplete—but, with 54 countries and 1.6 billion people, how could it not be? What makes Studwell nonetheless compelling to read is his steadfast underlying belief that poverty is a product of policy decisions. Analytically, this is of course not quite right: as the first part discussed, strong historical and geographic factors condition what’s possible. But, for a practitioner, such belief—what Albert Hirschman once called a bias for hope—is surely a necessary condition for action.
Development is ultimately an act of imagination, of envisioning what’s not yet there. Sound policy requires that these visions be supported by durable political coalitions and within states’ capabilities. (A latent motif of the book is eager states overreaching with megaprojects, in a vain attempt to leapfrog their peers.) But even the mixed success of import substitution industrialization or the follies of incomplete irrigation megaworks seem preferable to the status quo of seeking rents while sitting on one’s hands.
On one final point I am in wholehearted agreement.
At various points Studwell discusses “demonstration effects”: the positive influence one country can have on peer states. Demonstration effects are essentially impossible to falsify in the modern language of econometrics, but are unmistakeable in the real world. (If you disagree, take a look again at Meles Zenawi’s library.) The world really only has two industrial clusters: one began in 18th century Britain, and grew to encompass most of Europe and its colonial offshoots; the other started in Meiji Japan and spread to the rest of East Asia. In both cases, culturally similar neighbors saw what was possible and copied the recipe.
In one sense, this is a note for pessimism. If history is any guide, the great global factory complex will first stretch down from China through to mainland Southeast Asia and Indonesia, and westward through Bangladesh and India, long before it ever reaches Africa. But in another, it sounds a note of hope. If even one African country manages to sustain the kind of broad-based growth that Studwell describes, it could do for its neighbors what Meiji Japan accomplished for the rest of Asia. It may only take one resounding success to shatter the illusion—fed by sixty years of disappointment, egged on by lingering prejudice—that Africans are incapable of achieving economic prosperity.
Studwell presents a careful and sensitive discussion about the tradeoffs between formal land rights (which would make possible land reform) and the present communal landholding that dominates the continent. Considering the elite capture of legal systems, which will likely only favor rich landholders, he ultimately decides that communal landholding is likely better than the alternatives. Smallholder agriculture will have to wait.
How Africa Works, Economist review
February 16, 2026
Africa needs to follow Asia’s path to grow
So argues an important new book, “How Africa Works”
Feb 12th 2026|3 min read
Listen to this story
How Africa Works. By Joe Studwell. Atlantic Monthly Press; 416 pages; $32. Profile Books; £25
Africa is adding 300m people per decade: by 2050 it will be home to 2.5bn, a quarter of humanity. As the rest of the world ages, the continent’s youthfulness stands out. It will play a bigger role in the global labour market and as a source of consumers, culture and ideas. Thought-provoking new books about Africa are therefore sorely needed. In “How Africa Works” Joe Studwell, a visiting fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, a think-tank, has written one of the most interesting analyses of the past few years. It will prove valuable reading for anyone curious to understand “the last great frontier of global development”.
Africa is home to most of the world’s poverty. Why? Mr Studwell argues that it is partly a result of “low-budget colonialism”. European powers extracted commodities, then left behind a pitifully tiny number of educated elites. Their arbitrary borders created kaleidoscopes of ethnically fragmented states.
So far, so familiar. But the author quickly moves on to make a more original argument. He singles out “chronically low population density” as an important cause of Africa’s underdevelopment. Asia was labour-rich and land-poor by the time of its economic rise. But because of scourges such as disease, crop-trampling elephants, slavery and bad soil, Africa has been much slower. As recently as 1975 the population density across Africa was equivalent to that of Europe in the 1500s. By 2030 Africa will have the population density Asia had in 1960. “Africa is only now becoming sufficiently densely populated to achieve strong economic growth,” potentially following in Asia’s footsteps, he argues.
It is a bold claim. In general GDP per person and density are not especially correlated. Some of the densest African countries, such as Burundi and Malawi, are the poorest. Other development experts have put more emphasis on literacy and fertility rates. But Mr Studwell’s case—that it takes a critical mass of people before markets can start to hum—has an intuitive logic.
Already four of the continent’s 54 states have shown impressive growth in recent years. The stories of Botswana and Rwanda will be familiar to Africa-watchers. But those about Mauritius and Ethiopia are newer and welcome. Across the quartet—in an echo of Stefan Dercon’s “Gambling on Development” (2022)—Mr Studwell notes the presence of a “developmental coalition” transcending ethnic lines.
Part of the reason Mr Studwell’s book was so keenly anticipated is that he came to the subject quite fresh, as an outsider. He wrote “How Asia Works” in 2013, ascribing that continent’s escape from poverty to more productive family farms, export-oriented manufacturing and state intervention in finance. Later Bill Gates asked him what he thought about Africa. That conversation and a visit to east Africa seem to have inspired him to turn to the continent; he has since travelled extensively there and surveyed the academic literature. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he concludes that Asia’s development recipe would be ideal for Africa, too. Two of his star subjects, Ethiopia and Mauritius, have already done more than most African countries to follow in that vein.
Some scholars will question how important—and how possible—it is for Africa to pursue this classic story of structural transformation. On the face of it, the Asian mould feels foreign: South Sudan will not become South Korea. Africans may also feel that their politicians do not get enough blame for the corruption and complacency that have stymied growth so far.
But in 2026 African GDP growth is (unusually) set to outpace that of the Asia-Pacific region, as the Chinese economy slows and commodity prices have surged. Investors are becoming more bullish about Africa as a destination for capital, not charity. And Africa’s careless political elites, terrified of their jobless youth, are starting to see economic growth as crucial to their own preservation. There is no stronger development incentive than survival. ?
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Continental fates”
From the February 14th 2026 edition
How Africa Works, first of the podcasts
February 10, 2026
There are lots of podcasts done and coming following the publication of How Africa Works and I will endeavour to provide links to more. To kick off, here is half an hour with an old friend — former IMF staffer, investment bank economist and independent emerging markets analyst Jon Anderson.
This link should take you there. There are a few graphs that will help you understand what this book is banging on about.
How Africa Works is out in the UK, FT review
February 10, 2026
My new book, How Africa Works, is out in the UK and will be out in the US on February 17 (and dates around this in other parts of the world). The first review that I have seen was published in the Financial Times. Here it is:
‘A dazzling reassessment of the continent’s historic handicaps, and its potential for economic development. … One of the most original and important books on Africa in years.’
How Africa Works by Joe Studwell — how to change the economic trajectory A dazzling reassessment of the continent’s historic handicaps, and its potential for economic development
In 2013, writer and academic Joe Studwell produced a brilliant, intellectually daring account of the factors underlying Asia’s economic miracle. Called How Asia Works, the book flew in the face of the pro-market prescriptions of the Washington consensus, concluding that Asia’s most successful economies had thrived through unorthodox policies: a combination of agricultural reform based on intensively farmed small plots, financial repression and industrial policy turbocharged by a ruthless drive to export.
Impressed, government officials in Ethiopia and Rwanda, both serious about development, suggested that Studwell write about their continent. “In Ethiopia, in particular, I was struck by my hosts’ depth of knowledge and their appetite for more,” Studwell writes, before concluding in typically terse style: “The invitations were flattering but pointless.” He knew nothing about Africa.
Studwell subsequently set about putting that right. He devoted seven years to intense reading and field research, collecting empirical evidence rather than received wisdom. The result is one of the most original and important books on Africa in years. Especially in the dazzling first section, almost every page bristles with ideas and challenges to lazy (often prejudiced) thinking.
How Africa Works is arranged in three parts. The first, contrary to the title, is an analysis of why Africa doesn’t work. More accurately, it catalogues the factors, sometimes surprising, that help explain why most of the 54 states into which Africa was corralled by colonialism have failed to emulate Asia’s economic take-off.
The second section is a study of four states — Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia and Rwanda — that have managed to generate long periods of sustained growth. The third is an assessment of what it would take for other African economies to emulate that record, with particular emphasis on the agricultural and manufacturing revolutions that were essential to Asian growth. Throughout, Studwell steers carefully between the Scylla of fatalism and the Charybdis of frothy optimism.
Africa’s two big development handicaps, he argues, are a sparse population and what he calls “low budget” colonialism. The first factor, in particular, challenges conventional thinking, but Studwell makes his case powerfully. At the start of the 20th century, Africa’s population density — at under five people per square kilometre — was similar to England’s in 1066
Before the 20th century, because of factors including a high disease burden, slavery and the preponderance of crop-destroying elephants, Africa was thinly populated. Between 1700 and 1850, the population barely budged and, even by 1950, there were fewer Africans than there had been Asians in 1500. At the start of the 20th century, Africa’s population density — at under five people per square kilometre — was similar to England’s in 1066.
Studwell argues that this retarded development. In pre-colonial times, it slowed state formation. Unlike in crowded Europe, where nations were formed through war, in Africa, when one set of people didn’t like their leaders, they simply picked up and started someplace else. At the onset of colonialism, there were 10,000 African polities, some of them proto-states but many “loose groupings” of between 5,000 and 10,000 people “constituted as micro-monarchies”.
Since independence, a sparse population has made it harder to deliver services, such as electricity and education, to rural populations. From Studwell’s perspective, the explosive population growth of recent decades, viewed with alarm by many Africa-watchers, is nothing more than “an extremely belated process of demographic normalisation”. Since 1960, around the time many African nations gained independence, the continent’s population has more than quintupled to 1.5bn and is forecast to add a further billion people in the next 25 years.
The previously sparse population, overlaid by “low budget colonialism” — shallow, brief and extractive — made Africa less ready for take-off than many Asian states. Tanzania, by no means an outlier, gained independence with two engineers, 12 doctors, 120 ethnic groups and 85 per cent illiteracy.
African leaders made a collective decision not to contest colonial borders. Since 1960, Studwell counts five interstate wars and 38 civil wars. “Most of Africa was frozen as an atomised, pre-modern ‘ethnic’ jigsaw,” he writes. “The violent process by which state formation took place in Europe was interrupted.”
Studwell is too astute to blame everything on colonialism, or even on pre-colonial factors. The book’s second section examines how four countries set about overcoming their inheritance, albeit imperfectly. The chapters on Mauritius and Ethiopia are particularly enlightening.
Mauritius, dismissed as “an overcrowded barracoon” (slave enclosure) by the writer VS Naipaul, is now on the cusp of becoming a high-income country. The key, argues Studwell, was to forge a political coalition across ethnic lines, one whose overriding goal was development. In lieu of the radical land reform that took place in Asia’s most successful economies, Franco-Mauritian sugar barons were forced to finance development through taxes. These were recycled into special economic zones and a textile industry that became the basis for a push into higher-end manufacturing, finance and luxury tourism.
Mauritius has not done everything right. Studwell blames it for not pushing manufacturing beyond jewellery, watches and small-scale electronics. But the key to its significant success, he writes, has been a lack of ideology. Whether former Marxists or rampant capitalists, leaders emulated China’s cautious attitude described as “crossing the river by feeling the stones”. They experimented and then did more of what worked.
Ethiopia has been even more important as a potential development template. With 137mn people, it is the continent’s most populous nation after Nigeria. Once a byword for famine and misrule, under Meles Zenawi, who came to power after the overthrow in 1991 of a disastrous Soviet-backed regime, Ethiopia modelled itself on South Korea and Taiwan.
For Meles, everything was about instilling a sense of national mission. He liked the story of Taiwanese customs officers who extracted bribes on imported consumer items but never on the capital equipment needed for national improvement. Ethiopia prioritised agriculture — a Studwell essential — building rural roads and providing farmers with advice and fertiliser. Agricultural output quadrupled. Farmers’ savings were trapped by capital controls (Studwell’s financial repression), lifting investment to 41 per cent of GDP, on a par with Asia.
Meles, who died in 2012, thought growth would trump ethnic conflict. After 1991, the economy expanded by 6-10 per cent annually, but conflict came anyway amid resentment over the political control exerted by officials from the northern Tigray region from where Meles came. Studwell calls the resulting 2020-22 war in Tigray, in which 600,000 people died, “the biggest development tragedy in a generation”. Still, growth continued and Studwell too hopes that economic gains can eventually smother ethnic divisions.
The final section strikes a note of measured optimism. Some countries will fail, Studwell writes. But others have hit a stage at which development becomes possible. In 2030, Africa will finally reach the population density of Asia in 1960, its point of take-off. African urbanisation rates are the fastest in history. Ninety African cities have populations above 1mn against two in 1960. Scarcer land and more urban demand has forced an improvement in yields and created a landless peasantry fit for the factory. Relative wages have fallen, while education levels have soared.
With the right policies, Studwell argues, the conditions are in place for Asian-style manufacturing-led development. He dismisses those who say technology means Africa has missed the boat. A textile machine costs $100,000 upfront, he says. A Madagascan worker costs $65, paid monthly.
Studwell’s conclusion is that, while most African countries are not going to become development states, many can move the policy needle. If by 2060 they reach the African Development Bank’s target of $4,500 GDP per capita — a stretch for some admittedly — the continent would have an economy not much smaller than today’s China. Africa he concludes is not “a miracle waiting to happen”, nor is it “a monolithic failure”. The truth lies somewhere in between.
How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Developmental Frontier by Joe Studwell Profile £25/Grove $32, 448 pages
David Pilling is the FT’s Africa editor