I was reading an article in the Atlantic about the Chinese manufacturing juggernaut and I was wondering if something like that couldn’t be done in Africa, at least in countries that weren’t involved in active civil war. What do you think?
Thanks for your help,
Rob
Of course it could be done, but is it likely? A lot of these nations are ruled by people who have no idea about how to create a wealthy society. Instead, they prefer to enact rules that restrict the freedom of their people to engage in economic activity. Until that changes, then Africa will remain the economic backwater that it (largely) is today.
Ok, then, how about, “What would have to happen to make Africa into the next China?”
Thanks,
Rob
Well for one thing, China has a single autocratic centralized government which maintains pretty tight political control over the business enterprises and civil society in a large geographical area. Africa, on the other hand, is a continent full of different countries with different governments.
If we were looking for a modern political/economic model for Africa to emulate, Europe would probably be closer to its political structure (and geographic/cultural/linguistic diversity) than China is.
Of course, Africa isn’t currently anywhere close to the European model of an economically developed multi-state continent either. But I think the prospect of Africa imitating Europe, however remote, is more likely than the prospect of Africa turning into a single state with a single market-communism government like China.
I think you are a little off about Chinese governmental control of business, at least in Special Administrative Regions like Shenzhen. Also, I realize that Africa is made up of several sovereign states but surely one or more of them could act like China.
Thanks,
Rob
Africa cannot be anything like China. One of the things that people neglect when they try to equivocate every culture on the planet is that the bureaucratic infrastructure of cultures is built over the course of millenia. China was a cohesive entity 2500 years ago. Africa was NEVER a cohesive entity. China was building major cities and connecting roads for thousands of years. They have had a strong mercantile culture throughout history. One of the things that people look at with China right now is the quality of its education. They are pumping out so many PhDs that the level of respect internationally that people have for a Chinese PhD is lower. These are the sorts of things a culture has to build up over time.
When you look at Africa, you can see that the countries with a historical established infrastructure like Egypt, Morocco and Ethiopia have a stronger centralized authority. In other cases it’s built upon the European Colonialist systems.
Just because a place has people and resources doesn’t mean it can automatically become a powerhouse. Africa has nothing even approaching unity, many of its countries are at war with inner turmoil, from Zimbabwe to the Sudan to Nigeria.
I do think it’s inevitable as labor gets more expensive in China and Southeast Asia, that manufacturing may well shift to Africa, as the world’s last remaining pool of dirt-cheap labor. However, the difference is likely to be that the entrepreneurs will continue to be Chinese, and only the labor will be African.
China is one of the world’s great civilizations, with a tradition of national and cultural unity going back millennia. Subsaharan Africa has nothing of the kind. None of its precolonial states was very large or long-lasting. It never developed a transnational literature, except in Arabic, limited to the Muslim regions only. Except in Ethiopia, no African language was ever written. The only languages of wider communication in Africa are English, French, Arabic and Swahili; the only transnational religions are Christianity and Islam. It will be a long time before the Africans develop a sense of common identity even to the extent the Europeans have now. Not that it’s impossible.
Nah. Remember, I didn’t say that the Chinese central government was directly controlling the economic operations of businesses, I said that it maintained political control over them. And so it does. “Experimental zones” like Shenzhen may have unprecedented freedom in handling things like foreign exchange and offshore financing, but the government still regulates what they’re allowed to say:
sweeteviljesus, you’re asking questions here that development specialists, from research economists to public investment lenders, spend entire lifetimes working on. And you know what? There is very little agreement about how best to develop a poor third-world country to create an advanced industrial (or post-industrial) state. We can see that it happens sometimes, but that absurdly simple observation is a lot easier to make than figuring out the how and the why of the thing.
From my armchair readings of the thing, I’d say that there are several essential factors, the lack of any one of which will cause the failure of the country to develop.
You rightly left out the obvious non-qualifiers such as states suffering from civil wars, but even the stability of the country’s regime doesn’t guarantee growth. If corruption is widespread throughout every level of government, especially in the civil legal system, then that discourages investors from taking an interest in the country. Why bother building business there if the costs of bribery and other forms of graft are too high to make it a worthwhile investment?
This partially fits under the first category. Many poor governments can like to enforce anti-trade policies that are ostensibly designed to protect local businesses, but which in fact reduce international trade, which is always the lifeblood of a rapidly growing economy. Corrupt governments also tend to protect their own inefficient monopolists, who use their wealth to protect their own interests.
But access to trade is more than just bad government practices. Africa is a geographic nightmare with difficult terrain that hinders transport, and so many parts of the country are simply too far away from the ocean (and thus from useful trade lanes) for the people to be able to exchange their goods cheaply on the international market. And even if you look at China, the main growth areas are the seaports. The landlocked interior of the country is still predominately trapped in its poverty. It’s only now that the coastal cities are mostly developed that economic progress is moving inland. Meanwhile, there’s a large and disturbing disparity of income between those rich cities and the impoverished inland.
AIDS is the obvious first thing to mention. When they have a generation of orphans, they have serious problems. But more than that, Africa’s tropical climate leaves it open to a wide range of diseases that are less prevalent in more temperate regions. Mosquito based diseases like malaria are significant problems in an area that’s already too poor to provide adequate healthcare to its people.
Wal-Mart pressures its suppliers, who need to close their American factories and open sweat-shops abroad to cut prices and maintain a space on the shelves of the world’s largest retailer. Right now, they mostly go to China. Why? Because everybody goes to China, because China has proven that it has all the essential ingredients to produce goods on the cheap.
Why not Africa? Because Africa has proven that it can’t perform as China does. And the cycle repeats itself, with investors concentrating on growth in Asia instead of Africa, because that’s what has always worked. China is one damn big country with as many workers as you’d ever need. Africa is a bunch of poor, small, splintered nations, not all of which have the government quality necessary for investment, and even when they do, they still can’t compare to the Chinese population of over a billion folks, which is one helluva large labor market.
Really, it’s hard to blame the companies for taking the low-risk option, and it’s sad that the stigma of Africa reinforces itself instead of disappearing. But I don’t see anything changing anytime soon.
But just maybe, there could be more hope for Africa because of China itself. China is growing, as you noted, and they are starting to scour the globe themselves for places to invest, and they might not carry with them the hesitancies of Western investors because they have more first-hand experience with the shift from dirt-poor country to industrial powerhouse. And if that’s the case, then Africa might just have a sunnier future ahead because of Chinese interest.
Or so we can hope, anyway.
Kendall Jackson I’ve read a lot about how China’s interest in Africa actually hinders African advancement. From simple issues such as the support of tyrannical regimes such as the government of the Sudan, to more complex issues like extracting mineral wealth but not building an industrial base to refine them there in Africa. Also, another thing that happens in the Chinese come in and build Chinese businesses making it hard for African businesses to compete and keeps the African nations under the thumb of Chinese business. China’s bread and butter is it’s manufacturing base. It needs resources, which Africa has, but it also needs for Africa not to compete with its base.
Well, you could clear the continent of Africans and refill it with Chinese…
This is an interesting topic about which I know very little. On the face of it, there is nothing intrinsic to African states preventing them from developing, even along the lines of China or other Asian countries. Perhaps it would be useful to look at the individual states and ask: Which one is best position to establish itself as a rapidly growing industrializing nation? And I assume we are talking about sub-Sahara Africa, here.
How is South Africa doing? That country probably has the best infrastructure, at least.
South Africa still has plenty of room for improvement, but I think that “becoming China” would definitely be a step backward for them. At least they’ve (finally) got a democratic government, you know? I don’t think they need to look to China for hints on where to go from here.
Oh, and South Africa’s neighbor Botswana isn’t doing too badly either:
China, shmina. Which African country will be the next Botswana? (Barring the high HIV incidence, hopefully.)
My first reaction was, well of course. But I was pretty sure, and your link confirms it, that SA has a very unevenly distributed economy. There might very well be places where China would a step forward. However, given that they have developed areas within their own country, that would be the logical place to start looking.
Interesting note about Botswana. I knew I had heard that at least one African country had been doing fairly well-- that must’ve been the one. Per capita GDP of arourd $11k puts it close to Mexico. Of course, median income and poverty levels would tell us more about whether that wealth was getting to the actual people.
Well, parts of China, at least. China’s got quite a bit of economic unevenness itself.
John Mace Africa has many things that hold it back from becoming like China. The lack of a cohesive cultural history is a highly relevant factor. You make it sound as though because it is intangible and abstract that it is not relevant. It is more relevant than resources, as one can see from the fact that resource rich Africa is in turmoil.
kimstu Democracy is not an indicator of advancement of any kind. It is sort of an irrelevancy that has been picked up by those with a void in their crusader instinct as of late. There are plenty of democracies that are not doing terribly well, and plenty of non-democracies that are doing fine.
True. What China did successfully, though, was attract lots of foreign investment. To the extent that SA needs to do that, then that would be a good strategy to pursue. Of course, being a democratic country, SA would probably go about it differently-- working more thru the private sector. The rural parts of China are in some ways getting worse. As China pulls back on the communist practice of supplying at least basic needs (like health care and education), the private sector isn’t developed enough to step in-- rural people just don’t have the money to pay for those things. And they’re not allowed to just pick and move to the city.
So saying that some parts of SA might try and emulate China is extremely simplistic. It’s unclear how well they could actually do that without drastically changing their government’s basic structure.
I disagree. You’re right that democracy by itself does not automatically produce economic or social development, and that there are a number of democratically-governed countries that are brutal and backward.
Nonetheless, democracy still seems to be one of the prerequisites for stable and lasting economic development in the context of political freedom, so I do consider that a “second world” country like South Africa or India gains an advantage from having a democratic government.
