(Roughly) Daily

And there are about to be a great many of those young people… As we exit the Holidays looking forward, our global foci tend to be the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and East Asia. In an updated re-post (the original of which was featured here), the estimable Noah Smith reminds us not to neglect Africa…

Africa has been mostly out of the news in the U.S. these days. But if you think about the rest of this century, and what that’s going to look like, it’s impossible not to think about the world’s second-largest continent. The two reasons, simply put, are 1) population, and 2) poverty. Africa’s fertility rate is shrinking, just like everywhere else, but it started doing so much later. So population momentum is going to make Africa VERY populous by the time it peaks (which some forecasters think will happen at around the end of the century). [See the chart above, taken from this IMF report.]

You’ll notice that these estimates are quite a bit lower than the ones in my first graph in the [original post]. This is because Africa’s fertility rates have been falling a lot more than people expected. But even with these lower estimates, Africa is projected to be absolutely huge by the end of the century. And its fraction of the young population will be far higher still. There will come a time, not too long from now, when countries around the world are clamoring for African migrants instead of trying to keep them out.

The other reason Africa is important is poverty; it’s now clear that Africa will be the last major world region to escape a subsistence standard of living. The question of whether and how it can escape this fate is the subject of the post below. But notice that the flip side of poverty is potential; being poor means you have a lot of room to grow, and by the end of this century, most labor-intensive tasks will probably be done in Africa.

And growth is actually doing well. Despite all the talk of decoupling and the big slowdown in China, and despite the occasional hand-wringing in the Western press, growth in Sub-Saharan Africa has been pretty robust in 2022 and 2023. And that’s projected to continue this year…

…

Just how to jump-start productivity growth in African manufacturing is a difficult question. Should countries make their exchange rates cheaper? Improve infrastructure? Spend more on education and health? Are free trade agreements important here? Do industrial policies and/or export promotion have any role to play? Or does the rise of automation simply mean that countries can’t get rich with labor-intensive manufacturing anymore?

I don’t know. But… the fact that Africa has some productive manufacturers and the fact it has managed to shift more people into factory work are both good signs. And though Asia’s growth boom is still going strong, it can’t last forever, and Africa’s day as the workshop of the world may come soon.

But economists, leaders, policymakers, businesspeople, and international organizations need to be focusing on this challenge more than they are. The fate of humanity in the 21st century and beyond hinges on whether African countries can figure out the riddle of industrialization…

Smith may be over-optimistic… in which case, economic, political, and climate migrants will stream out of Africa. Or, it may be that Africa’s development will follow a new and different social, political, and economic logic (see. e.g., here, here, and here).

In any event, Africa matters absolutely: “All futurism is Afrofuturism,” from @Noahpinion.

See also: Reynaldo Anderson‘s contribution, “In a post-American world order, Africa becomes a power player,” to Politico‘s “The Unpredictable But Entirely Possible Events That Could Throw 2024 Into Turmoil” (all of which are provocative).

If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

* Neil Turok

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As we devote ourselves to development, we might recall that it was on this date in 1912 (the anniversary of the 1806 Battle of Blaauwberg, as a result of which the British gained sovereignty over the Dutch Cape Colony, which we now know as South Africa) that the African National Congress was founded. Originally known as the South African Native National Congress, it began as a liberation movement, then became a political party. It has governed South Africa since 1994, when the first post-apartheid election resulted in Nelson Mandela‘s election as President of South Africa.