REVIEW
Africa as a development frontier of the 21st century
How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Developmental Frontier Joe Studwell Profile Books, 2026, 448 pages, ISBN: 978-0802158437
Our reviewer finds reason for optimism in Joe Studwell’s How Africa Works , but also takes issue with some conceptual shortcomings of the widely acclaimed international bestseller By Mahdi Rahimi, OPEC Fund
A s Africa’s development path remains convoluted, the demand for answers remains strong. The success of the latest book by the development economist Joe Studwell proves the point. His book How Africa Works has not only won the praise of the Financial Times and Bill Gates but also found a wide audience. In bookstores it is hard not to find it these days. This is unusual because the last time books about development were bestsellers probably dates to the days of Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon or Eduardo Galeano. Studwell takes a more conventional approach, building on the reputation he won with his widely successful forerunner “How Asia Works,” which chronicled the economic rise of Asia (more exactly: Far East Asia and the so-called “Asian Tigers” Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan). In his Asia book, he identified three key success factors: (1) land reform, (2)
focused industrialization and exports and (3) support for small and medium- sized enterprises. These are also the main ingredients in the development recipes he cooks up in his new book. In general, and with an audience of FT readers in mind, he does a fairly decent job. The Africa book has three major building blocks: First, it presents the development “context” with Studwell setting out historical differences in geographical, historical and legacy factors of colonialism between Africa and Asia. His argument is that primary education in Asian countries such as Taiwan and South Korea was at the beginning of the 60s, when most African countries gained independence, much more advanced than in African countries due to a different history of colonialism (Western vs. Japanese) and population density. He concludes that Asia had a better starting position.
Furthermore, Asian countries enjoyed relative peace compared to the frequent civil wars and almost permanent violent conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa from the mid-1970s onwards when the real divergence in wealth between Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa happened. As a third beneficial factor, he points to good governance in Southeast Asia, especially after the 1980s, along with better and stronger public governance. The second part of the book is an assessment of four developmental success stories in Africa, where countries were or are experiencing strong growth under strong and strategic leadership: Botswana, Ethiopia, Mauritius and Rwanda. Studwell finds parallels to the Asian model. For instance, Ethiopia’s land reform in favor of smallholder farmers relieved the population from hunger and stimulated the national economy by creating a stepping stone for textile manufacturing. Another
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