Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
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African policymakers should embrace a more pragmatic economic agenda that recognizes and capitalizes on Africa’s comparative edge: a greater abundance of land rather than low-cost labor.
The success of the new U.S. investment strategy may ultimately depend on how a bill in Congress addresses these key components.
The European Green Deal is mainly a collection of internal EU policy instruments, yet its potential impacts will reach African countries. Such effects will be felt in the market for agriculture, fossil fuels, and other natural resources.
After stagnating for decades, economic growth in Africa has accelerated, but maintaining this rapid growth is far from guaranteed. Policy makers must build on past successes and tackle tough reforms before the world’s poorest continent can make sustained economic progress.
Countries with a combination of a large land mass and a sizeable population tend to be chronically unstable politically and economically. Allowing their problems to fester, the case all too often in the past, is a source of continuing hardship to their citizens and neighbors alike. The international community needs to consider a new approach to the problems of these nations.
In the 1990s, the Clinton administration led the international community in pursuit of a grand vision of reforming African countries into modern free-market democracies. That vision, however, was a poor match for the reality of conflict and stagnation on the ground. U.S. resources fell short of the rhetoric, and the policy yielded few results.