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Poverty Reduction in Africa SPECIAL FEATURE Poverty reduction in Africa SPECIAL FEATURE Paul Collier* Centre for the Study of African Economies, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, Manor Road, Oxford OX1 3XU, United Kingdom Edited by Partha Sarathi Dasgupta, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, and approved July 30, 2007 (received for review January 8, 2007) Poverty in Africa has been rising for the last quarter-century, while it interactions between physical geography and human geography has been falling in the rest of the developing world. Africa’s distinc- that generate intractable problems, and I conclude with tive problem is that its economies have not been growing. This article implications for international strategies. attempts to synthesize a range of recent research to account for this failure of the growth process. I argue that the reasons lie not in Physical Geography: Three Opportunity Groups African peculiarities but rather in geographic features that globally Africa’s defining physical geography is of a massive land area cause problems but that are disproportionately pronounced in Africa. divided into 44 countries, with a low population density. Because These features interact to create three distinct challenges that are Africa is land-abundant, yet low-income, natural resource endow- likely to require international interventions beyond the conventional ments loom large. However, they are unevenly distributed. Parts of reliance on aid. Africa are abundant in natural resources, but others are resource- scarce. Further, because Africa is enormous and divided into many growth ͉ geography ͉ economic development countries, many of them are landlocked. Potentially, these two distinctions create four possible categories. However, in growth lobally, the number of people in absolute poverty has been in regressions, the resource-rich coastal countries and the resource- Gdecline for Ϸ25 years, yet in Africa it is still increasing. The rich landlocked countries are not significantly different. If the challenge of poverty reduction in Africa is of a different order from resources are sufficiently valuable, being landlocked is not a sig- that elsewhere and will require different strategies. Other low- nificant disadvantage to their extraction. Conversely, the coastal income regions are growing rapidly, and there the issue is how to countries are generally not in a position to take advantage of SCIENCES diffuse growth. In the middle-income regions, redistribution could nonresource exports because of the effects of Dutch disease on their ECONOMIC radically reduce absolute poverty. Africa has not been growing, and export competitiveness. We thus have three categories: resource- rich, resource-scarce but coastal, and resource-scarce and land- its income level is too low for redistribution to resolve poverty.† locked. In growth regressions these three categories have had Hence, Africa’s problem is to break out of an economic stagnation sharply distinct performances globally, and this has been mirrored that has persisted for three decades. This article deploys existing in Africa. The best-performing category globally has been the primary research into an integrated argument that accounts for coastal, resource-scarce countries of which there are many Asian Africa’s economic distinctiveness and derives implications for examples. The worst-performing category globally has been the international policies for poverty reduction.‡ landlocked and resource-scarce. In between, the resource-rich During the present decade, African growth has accelerated, countries have on average grown moderately but with large differ- although not sufficiently rapidly to prevent continuing divergence. ences both between countries and time periods. Table 1 shows the This may mark a decisive turnaround in the region’s economic growth rates for each category. performance, but much of it is accounted for by the boom in the Africa broadly followed the global pattern, with three differ- world prices of Africa’s commodity exports, the scramble to extract ences. The largest difference was in the category of countries that its raw materials, and recent peace settlements. Each of these is a are resource-scarce and coastal: since around 1980 the non-African fragile basis for sustained growth. Hence, Africa’s longer economic economies in this category have been outperforming their African experience remains pertinent. On average, over the period 1960– counterparts by Ϸ5% per year. Nor is this confined to China and 2000 Africa’s population-weighted per capita annual growth of India. Even when these two are excluded, there is a severe diver- gross domestic product (GDP) was a mere 0.1%. It stagnated, gence. The second difference was in the resource-rich category, whereas other regions experienced accelerating growth. Indeed, although here the difference has persisted since the 1960s. Only in between 1980 and 2000 the annual rate of divergence was an the category of landlocked and resource-scarce countries, which astounding 5%. globally have been slow-growing, is the difference modest. The Africa’s growth failure has attracted competing explanations. cumulative implications of these differences in growth rates for the During the 1980s the World Bank diagnosed the problem as path of GDP per capita have been dramatic. Essentially, outside inappropriate economic policies with Berg (1) offering the first Africa countries have on average decisively broken out of poverty, clear statement of this position. Bates (2) was the first to explain rising above $5,000 per capita, as long as they are not landlocked these dysfunctional policy choices in terms of the interests of and resource-scarce. Indeed, thanks to their fast growth they are powerful groups, notably the taxation of export agriculture. During converging on the developed countries. By contrast, in Africa on the 1990s, the limited response to reform induced a broader search average countries in all three categories has stayed resolutely stuck for explanations (3, 4). Recently, three further explanations have gained currency: institutions (5), leadership (6), and geography (7). In this article I emphasize geography, although not on the health Author contributions: P.C. wrote the paper. aspects that have been the main recent concern of Sachs (7). I The author declares no conflict of interest. suggest that the role for institutions, and indeed for leadership, This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. varies according to Africa’s distinctive physical and human Abbreviations: GDP, gross domestic product; OECD, Organization for Economic Coopera- geography. tion and Development. In the next section, I consider physical geography, showing how *E-mail: [email protected]. strategies will need to differ radically among Africa’s countries. †Indeed, although income inequality in Africa has been rising, this may be necessary to Then, I turn to human geography and the political problems that retain skilled labor in the face of its increasing international mobility, given the stagnation this has created. To an extent these problems have been sur- of average income. mounted: Africa’s human geography may explain delayed take-off ‡For a fuller version see ref. 8. rather than predict persistent stagnation. Then, I consider three © 2007 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA www.pnas.org͞cgi͞doi͞10.1073͞pnas.0611702104 PNAS ͉ October 23, 2007 ͉ vol. 104 ͉ no. 43 ͉ 16763–16768 Downloaded by guest on September 30, 2021 Table 1. Growth per capita, by opportunity category and decade Overall Coastal Landlocked Resource-rich Decade 43 SSA 56 Other Difference 43 SSA 56 Other Difference 43 SSA 56 Other Difference 43 SSA 56 Other Difference 1960s 1.04 2.29 1.25 1.36 2.25 0.89 0.16 0.74 0.58 2.08 3.85 1.77 1970s 0.86 3.23 2.37 1.32 3.18 1.86 Ϫ0.31 1.26 1.57 1.42 3.89 2.47 1980s Ϫ0.79 4.32 5.11 Ϫ0.85 4.68 5.53 0.14 1.56 1.42 Ϫ1.67 1.50 3.17 1990–2000 Ϫ0.46 4.46 4.91 0.27 4.74 4.47 Ϫ1.30 1.91 3.21 Ϫ0.42 2.47 2.89 Total 0.13 3.63 3.50 0.50 3.79 3.29 Ϫ0.36 1.40 1.76 0.29 2.89 2.60 The sample includes all developing countries with full availability of data. Growth rates are population-weighted. The annual growth rates are population- weighted. Note that the country composition of the group averages changes as the group composition evolves. SSA, Sub-Saharan Africa. below $2,000 per capita. As a result, Africa has been diverging from on their neighbors. Most obviously, they depend on their coastal the rest of mankind. The third difference between Africa and the neighbors for access to the sea. This is an unreciprocated depen- other developing regions is in the distribution of population be- dence: Uganda depends on Kenya for access, but Kenya does not tween the three categories. In the developing world other than depend on Uganda. Coastal countries differ in how seriously they Africa some 88% of the population lives in coastal, resource-scarce prioritize the interests of their landlocked neighbors. Nuno and countries, 11% in resource-rich countries, and a mere 1% in Venables (10) investigated the international transport costs faced by landlocked resource-scarce countries. In Africa the population is landlocked countries in importing a standard container from the approximately evenly spread between the three groups. Thus, the United States. They found that while the average landlocked African population is heavily skewed toward the globally slow- country indeed faced radically higher transport costs than coastal growing category of landlocked, resource-scarce, and away from the countries, the costs differed enormously. They were able to trace globally fast-growing category of coastal, resource-scarce. This these differences to expenditures on transport infrastructure in the unfortunate distribution accounts for around one percentage point coastal neighbors: where the neighbor had prioritized investment in of growth: even if African countries grew at the mean of their transport infrastructure the landlocked country faced substantially category, the distinctive distribution of the population would imply lower transport costs.
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