The Prospects for African Economic History: Is Today Included in the Long Run?

Abstract

The World Bank, in its controversial 1981 report on problems of African development, came down particularly hard on African governments for having inflated the state sector (World Bank, 1981: 40): During the past 20 years the public sector has greatly extended its economic role in Africa, as it has elsewhere. This growth has come not only from expansion of government per se, but also by extension of the state into commercial or productive activities—manufacturing, mining, transport, marketing—activities which were largely in private hands before independence. A recent World Bank study…showed that the public sector now employed between 40 and 74 percent of those recorded in paid employment. The Berg report, as it is known after its principal author, Elliott Berg, praises African governments for their accomplishments in education and health, but otherwise condemns them for following mistaken, state-centered economic policy. This is not to say, however, that the report praised colonial economic policies by comparison. Here is one of the few paragraphs in the report addressing the era before 1960 (World Bank, 1981: 11): Modern economic growth has a relatively brief history in Sub-Saharan Africa. Colonial administration established itself in most cases in the last two decades of the 19th century. Economic expansion came quickly in a few countries — Ghana, Senegal, Uganda, and Zaire, for example — and spread elsewhere later, with interruptions during World Wars I and II and the depression of the 1930s. However, general and sustained development came only after World War II in most of the countries of the region.