Poverty reduction in Africa
- Centre for the Study of African Economies, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, Manor Road, Oxford OX1 3XU, United Kingdom
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Edited by Partha Sarathi Dasgupta, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, and approved July 30, 2007 (received for review January 8, 2007)
Abstract
Poverty in Africa has been rising for the last quarter-century, while it has been falling in the rest of the developing world. Africa's distinctive problem is that its economies have not been growing. This article 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 African peculiarities but rather in geographic features that globally cause problems but that are disproportionately pronounced in Africa. These features interact to create three distinct challenges that are likely to require international interventions beyond the conventional reliance on aid.
Footnotes
- E-mail: paul.collier{at}economics.oxford.ac.uk
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Author contributions: P.C. wrote the paper.
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The author declares no conflict of interest.
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This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
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↵ † Indeed, although income inequality in Africa has been rising, this may be necessary to retain skilled labor in the face of its increasing international mobility, given the stagnation of average income.
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↵ § The following discussion is based on Collier and Hoeffler (19); Collier, Hoeffler, and Rohner (20); and Collier, Hoeffler, and Soderbom (21).
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↵ ¶ The following discussion is based on Collier (22) and Alesina and La Ferrara (23).
- Abbreviations:
- GDP,
- gross domestic product;
- OECD,
- Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
- © 2007 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA
