Review: How Africa Works

Subscribe to the print magazine before the end of February and get a copy of Issue 22 sent immediately, and further issues every two months.

When How Asia Works appeared in 2013, the prevailing mood was one of considerable optimism. China seemed a triumph of economic development. Between 1990 and 2013, China averaged a real annual growth rate of ten percent. It added almost half a billion urban residents and quintupled its manufacturing output. And other Asian economies were moving along comparable trajectories, if less spectacularly. Growth in India and parts of sub-Saharan Africa lent further weight to the idea that the developing world was at last catching up.

How Asia Works was Studwell’s theory of what drove this growth: land reform, export discipline, and states willing to impose hard constraints on capital. Beneath Studwell’s specific prescriptions lay a bolder claim: that countries were not condemned by geography, history, or culture to particular economic outcome, and a relatively small number of well-chosen policies could make an enormous difference. Tyler Cowen called it the best treatment of Asian industrial policy available. Noah Smith named it his favorite book on development. Bill Gates made the agriculture team at his foundation read it.

But a decade on, China’s growth has decelerated from over ten percent per year to around five. The rest of East Asia has settled into the one-to-three-percent range typical of mature economies. South and Southeast Asia continue to grow, but less spectacularly. And Africa, which once seemed poised to follow the same path, has not grown at all in per capita terms. Against this backdrop comes Studwell’s sequel, How Africa Works.

Against Afro-pessimism

How Africa Works opens with an account of the continent’s historical constraints. Studwell responds to what can be called the Afro-pessimist view: that postcolonial Africa was at least as wealthy as East Asia at independence, and that the subsequent divergence was a story of misgovernment. This widely held position, he argues, is premised on a mistaken reading of the limited quantitative evidence, driven by mismeasurement and temporary commodity booms at the moment national accounts were first assembled. The supposedly high incomes per person in Africa don’t match, for example, with the fact that life expectancy was two years lower than in South Asia and between 6 and 20 years lower than the level of countries in East and Southeast Asia.

What Africa inherited at ...