← Search

Explaining African Economic Performance

Paul Collier¹; Jan Willem Gunning²

¹ Paul Collier is at the World Bank, on leave from the Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford. · ² Jan Willem Gunning is at the Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford, on leave from the Department of Economics, Free University, Amsterdam.

Africa has had slow growth and a massive exodus of capital. In many respects it has been the most capital-hostile region. We review and interpret the aggregate-level and microeconomic literatures to identify the key explanations for this performance. There is a reasonable correspondence of the two sets of evidence, pointing to four factors as being important. These are a lack of openness to international trade; a high-risk environment; a low level of social capital; and poor infrastructure. These problems are to a substantial extent attributable to government behavior, and the paper includes a review of the political economy literature addressing that behavior.

DOI

10.1257/jel.37.1.64

Volume

37 (1)

Pages

64-111

Language

en

Export

BibTeX

Sources

openalex crossref