Africa's Development Trajectory: Lessons from China.

• Author: Magbadelo, John Olushola
• Position: Made in Africa: Learning to Compete in Industry; Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy; Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China - Book review

Made in Africa: Learning to Compete in Industry

By Carol Newman, John Page, John Rand, Abebe Shimeles, Mans Soderbon and Finn Tarp

Washington DC, Brookings Institution Press, 2016, xv + 268 pages, $35 (paperback), ISBN: 9780815728153

Fifty Inventions that shaped the Modern Economy

By Tim Harford

New York, Riverhead Books, 2017, iv+ 321 pages, [pounds sterling]8.16 (hardcover), ISBN: 9780735216136

Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the making of Global China

By Julian Gewirtz

Harvard University Press, 2017, iii + 389 pages, $36 (hardcover), ISBN 9780674971134

Africa has been experiencing an appreciable measure of economic growth since 1995. This palpable improvement in the African condition has meant that the Afro-pessimism of the previous decade had to be jettisoned for the more positive narrative captioned as Africa rising. Made in Africa by Carol Newman, et al. is the outcome of a research program on Learning to Compete (L2C) sponsored by the African Development Bank, the Brookings Institution, and the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNUWIDER) with the objective of identifying why there is so little industry in Africa despite the impressive record of economic growth being posted by the continent. This research, according to the authors, was undertaken to provide an explanation for why Africa's economic growth is not backed up with a requisite economic structure that could sustain the continent's development. The book focuses essentially on how Africa can industrialize and how its firms can compete in global markets of industrial goods. The authors' interest in embarking on the research and producing its findings in this compendium is to set a new agenda for industrial development in Africa. Using case studies approach, the authors chronicle the industrialization efforts and outcomes in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda, Tunisia, and two East Asia's newest industrializers -Cambodia and Vietnam- with a view to unearthing the problems militating against industrialization in Africa.

Made in Africa is about firms and what it would take for Africa to become a global industrial hub that would enable the continent to properly anchor its economic growth which has over time posted an impressive record of performance. The book has four broad parts. The first part stresses the importance of industry to Africa's economic development agenda. The second part, which consists of chapters 2 and 3, presents the historical quest for industrial development in Africa while assessing the industrial efforts and outcomes in all the eleven countries studied by the authors. The third part, which consists of chapters 4, 5 and 6, discusses the factors that could spur industrialization in Africa including firm productivity, exports, competition, firm capabilities, and industrial clusters. The last part, which consists of chapters 7, 8, and 9, is an attempt by the authors to highlight policies and strategies that would stimulate industrialization in Africa: closing infrastructure and skills gaps, reforming regulations and institutions, pushing exports, policy and institutional reforms, improving trade logistics, strengthening regional infrastructure and institutions, and attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). However, the authors are quick to point out that the outlined industrial strategy "would not succeed if it is implemented in a piecemeal or haphazard way." (pp. 180-181). They opine that the strategy 'calls for a level of coordination across government and a degree of engagement with private sector that is far more demanding than that anticipated by the investment climate reform agenda' (p. 181). Put differently, the authors have provided an anecdotal view of Africa's weak industrial base on the strength of the studies they conducted on nine African countries that were randomly chosen as representative samples of the continent. The argument they put forward is that Africa is not industrially developed because it lacks all the indices of industrial development. It is not helpful to list all the prevalent structures of industrial growth in other industrializing countries and present them as the requirements, conditions, or characteristic features of industrialization as the authors have done. True, most African countries lack what industrialized economies have in abundance. The near absence of industrial growth in Africa cannot be blamed on the absence of industrial policies but on the non-implementation of extant policies on industrialization in most African countries.

The political economy of postcolonial Africa, with which the authors do not reckon, could in fact provide insight into the causation of the seeming entrenchment of poverty-inducing and weak...