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I: What African policymakers need to know about the origins of modern economic growth

Modern economic growth is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before the modern era, there was, relatively speaking, a lot less variation around the world in individual-level measures of development outcomes. The average person was illiterate, lived a life characterized by poverty, scarcely had any material possessions, and died young. As late as 1900 about 40% of all children born died before they turned five.

Then over a few decades in the 18th century something clicked in northwestern Europe and unleashed what we understand today as sustained modern economic growth and the extension of mass prosperity.

Well, that is one version of the story; and one that admittedly compresses economic history across space and time.

There’s another version of the story that is more variegated. In this rendering, modern economic growth did not just spring out of nowhere. Instead, it was the culmination of centuries of cumulative marginal improvements (in trade, finance, law, politics, governance, engineering, science, etc) that eventually came together and ignited the commercial and then industrial revolutions that we are now familiar with. Notably, these societies developed cultures of growth and progress that sustained these processes over centuries.

Stated differently, societies that were able to quickly adopt and domesticate the organizational forms (especially polities, firms, and family units), technologies (with emphasis on scientific mastery of the physical world), and human habits (in personal, professional, and civic life) that are necessary to sustain modern economic growth and development were decidedly different from those that did not. With this in mind, to understand contemporary variation in the distribution of national incomes one must first understand (1) the origins of modern economic divergence over centuries; and (2) why certain countries or regions of the world have failed to engineer quick catch-up growth since the advent of modern economic growth.

And what were those differences that produced divergence? There are countless bad explanations out there of economic divergence over the last 500 years — ranging from hand-wavy essentialist takes on identity and culture, to heroic extrapolations across entire regions based on well-identified but narrow social scientific studies. There are also some very good academic debates on the topic — especially among works that explore the divergence between China, the Muslim world, and Western Europe (see here, here, here, here, here, and here, for example).

For policymakers interested in a practical understanding of the origins of modern economic growth, I’d advise them to rely on established patterns within literatures (as opposed to individual studies); take real histories of real places seriously; and to privilege parsimony over ornate stories that are little more than descriptions of symptoms and not fundamental causes of economic divergence across time and space.

This leads me to two factors that policymakers (as opposed to academics) should consider to be important for catalyzing and sustaining modern economic growth: stateness and elite hegemony (these should broadly be viewed as necessary but not sufficient conditions).

Centralized polities created the possibility of organizing (competitive) commerce at scale within and across well-defined territories. They provided security and other important public goods necessary for commercial flourishing, allocated and protected property rights, facilitated the scaling up of individual-level innovations, and through competition with other states provided strong incentives for economies to stay competitive and at the cutting edge of emerging innovations (i.e., stateness facilitated catch-up development). And following the advent of the modern era, states also became important vessels of national politics and policies — especially social policies that massively upgraded the quality of human capital. This, in turn, enabled both voluntary (e.g., stable wage labor) and coerced (e.g., taxation) redistribution of the benefits of commerce at scale — thereby enabling mass prosperity in a select set of prosperous polities.

Of course, stateness also facilitated the pillaging of less powerful states and peoples throughout the world, in addition to the benefits outlined above. But that’s no reason to dismiss the role of states as powerful platforms for beneficial collective action towards improving human welfare.

Organized elite hegemony was equally important. Here, what I mean by “organized elite hegemony” are religious, cultural, academic, and political elites who had the authority (and qualifications) to set (aspirational) standards and organize societal effort towards specific ends. Such elites had sufficient influence over the general public to coordinate social, political, and economic life; in addition to pursuing their own self preservation in ways that were generally consistent with the advancement of society at large (or at least as they understood it). Consequently, they were able to spawn and maintain cultures of progress, mechanisms for disciplining elites (religion, science, rational organization of civic life), and a sense of continuous improvement.

Importantly, the existence of organized elite hegemony facilitated change without societal collapse. Sometimes this slowed down progress, as when incumbents sought to protect their privileges (especially against mass interests). But in general, it enabled societies to change — as all societies must —on their (elites’) own terms, rather than being yanked about like rudderless vessels at sea by the forces of history.

Notice that the operative mechanism here wasn’t social stratification as an end in itself, or anything special about the specific elites who were in charge.

Rather, it was specialized sets of elites and their networks as a technology for coordination at scale and entrenching habits of continuous personal and social improvement. Some scholars have characterized this definition of elite hegemony as “institutions.” Unfortunately, such characterizations tend to be ahistorical and project contemporary institutional qualities and ends to earlier periods — almost as if the people-centric antecedents were destined to yield modern institutional forms and practices. I prefer to emphasize the role of proto-institutional elite formations in part because institutions tend to be as good as the people staffing them, in addition to their underlying logics and norms. The point here is that merely adopting “successful” institutional forms isn’t enough.

With this in mind, it is (or should be) clear how the confluence of strong states and organized elite hegemony gave some societies an advantage over their contemporaries; and prepared them to both engineer and exploit the benefits of modern economic growth.

How does this framing apply to our understanding of economic growth and development in contemporary African states? To that we now turn.

II: Why are African countries relatively poorer than most parts of the world?

In How Africa Works, Joe Studwell starts off by attempting to explain why African countries are poor today. It’s worth dwelling on this question since the many stylized explanations of the persistence of poverty in Africa out there fall well short; and because you can’t solve a problem that you don’t understand. Studwell lands on three main explanations that deserve close attention.

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I: Has industrial policy become the new development fad?

The March 31, 2026 release of a World Bank policy research report sympathetic towards industrial policy caused quite the buzz in development circles. Such a report has been a long way coming since the infamous 1993 misreading of the core drivers of East Asian economic takeoff; as well as countless efforts to stifle ambitious context-based policymaking before that. As most commentators on the report have already noted, the intellectual and empirical justifications for industrial policy are decades old, and includes lots academic/policy giants that were previously ignored by the Bank and the broader international development community. Better late than never, I guess.

This is post is not about the report itself (it’s a good primer on industrial policy for those unfamiliar with the concept), but mostly about what the World Bank (as well as donors and other multilaterals) might do with the recommendations in the report (and how policymakers in low-income countries should respond).

So why now? A cynical read of the situation might be that this is yet another instance of the World Bank as an institution (as opposed to the actual authors of the report) externalizing the dominant intellectual/policy orthodoxy among its most powerful shareholders. Industrial policy was bad when low-income countries were dabbling in it to accelerate their processes of catch-up development; but it’s now fine because certain high-income countries have reasons to do it more aggressively and openly (they’ve always done it, anyway) to compete with China.

Whatever the actual motivations behind the newfound institutional accommodation at the World Bank, the reality is that the last decade (especially with regard to green techno-industrial transformation and Artificial Intelligence) has created an intellectual cum political permission structure for anyone who wants to support industrial policy without fear of being considered “unorthodox” or a heretic. Industrial policy is now cool not only because versions of it make sense in both the real world and seminar rooms, but also because it makes perfect geoeconomic sense.

How should policymakers in low-income countries approach the openness to industrial policy at the Bank? I would suggest that they heed the lesson in this excerpt from Joe Studwell’s How Africa Works, in which he describes the faddist nature of the World Bank’s policy evangelism:

The aid sector […] is a fashion business. On a visit to the World Bank’s annual Land and Poverty conference in Washington D.C. at the start of my research for this book in 2019 I was told that just two things are required to make a poor country rich: land titling systems employing technology like drones and projects that empower women. Those causes owned the catwalk and filled the halls. Periodically, the dominant aid show changes.

‘The fashion when I joined [the World Bank] was community-driven development,’ Simeon Ehui, a regional director for Africa, told me. In part, fashion in the aid industry is driven by a natural human desire to identify a developmental magic bullet, even though none exists. In part it reflects the fact that donors are more responsive to simple, tidy solutions than to the reality that development is complex, requiring what the economist Albert Hirschman called ‘a multidimensional conspiracy’.

In aid, fashion is inevitable. Successful developing country governments are the ones able to decide what they need from the catwalk and politely decline what they do not.

More deleterious than fashion is ideology in aid. Ideologically driven aid offers only one option. Its heyday was the 1980s and 1990s, when the IMF and the World Bank pedalled a single flavour of financial sector reform that was born out of free market policies in Reaganite America and Thatcherite Britain. Developing countries were suddenly deemed to require the same mix of freely tradable currencies, private banks and lightly regulated stock markets that rich countries required.

For capable developing country governments nurturing infant export industries, it was terrible advice because it curtailed their capacity to finance and run industrial policy. Successful developing states ignored the advice. Less capable leaders swallowed the pill.

The point here is that any advice on industrial policy from the World Bank should be taken with a huge grain of salt.

The Bank may has some strengths on narrow technical questions, but it finds itself at sea on issues that require deep knowledge of context, politics, and history (like industrial policy). It’s for this reason that, as described in the above excerpt, policy prescriptions from the institution change with the seasons, with little or no consequences for past errors of commission or omission, however obvious those errors were ex ante.

Implementing industrial policy is very hard — as demonstrated by examples like Ajaokuta. As should be obvious, countries that choose to do so should fully own and implement industrial policy with eyes wide open. In brief, this means having coalitions of elites who actually want to develop their societies, and not just a bunch of two bit rent-seekers. Successful industrial policy shouldn’t mean a suspension of the rules of economics (Africa is littered with too many examples like the infamous Ajaokuta steel plant already). Neither should it mean rushing to mimic whatever other countries are doing, or implementing “global best practices” even if (or especially if?) sanctioned by World Bank economists. Instead, it’s a guided management of parts of the process of development that should start with a full internalization of the rules of economics, and then going about tweaking them for context on the road to ever deeper market efficiency. Stated differently, the bending of certain rules of economics must always be justified by concrete and defensible developmentalist imperatives.

Importantly, countries must embrace the idea of learning by doing. Relying on off-the-shelf industrial policies almost guarantees failure. There’s no set recipe. All anyone knows are the ingredients.

All this to say that industrial policy as will likely be packaged and peddled by the World Bank will have strong faddist elements, and will therefore not be of much help to low-income countries. The next section explains this claim in more detail.

II: You can’t successfully implement industrial policy by adhering “international best practices”

Now that there’s intellectual tolerance for industrial policy, it’s very likely that we’ll see the emergence of industrial policy “expertise” at the World Bank and other multilaterals. This would be a waste of human and financial capital. There are two reasons not to institutionalize “industrial policy advisories” within multilateral institutions.

First, low-income countries simply cannot and should not outsource the ambition and implementation discipline required to successfully execute industrial policies. To reiterate, the best way to get good at it is through learning by doing (something the World Bank report acknowledges in Box 3.2). Among other things, this is because industrial policies are inherently political, and must be explicitly anchored in domestic political economies. You need a durable developmentalist political coalition, bringing together bureaucrats, businesspeople, the wider society, and politicians. You need to make policy choices that set you apart from peers (and not procrustean recommendations from Washington, DC or wherever). You need to be open to experimentation and making mistakes (extreme risk aversion in the name of chasing “optimal” policies is terribly overrated). And you need to be able to think and act with the long term in mind (as opposed to short project cycles). All this necessarily involves building the requisite competencies as you go — which means that you shouldn’t impose too many preconditions on the process.

In short, you can’t projectize industrial policy.

Second, organizations like the World Bank and most other multilaterals are not institutionally designed to support industrial policy. The project cycles — from design, to institutional approval processes (influenced as much by geopolitics as narrow/faddist concerns), to implementation — are way too rigid to work alongside the domestic political economy and bureaucratic demands of industrial policymaking. Layered on top of this is the fact that the Bank, for example, pretends to not engage in their clients’ domestic politics — yet getting the politics right is foundational to being able to execute successful industrial policy.

In addition, and let’s be blunt here, the Bank just doesn’t have the human capital to execute on industrial policy projects. Most economists at the institution were trained to be skeptical of or downright hostile to industrial policy (see, for example, the World Bank’s recent ill-timed commentary on Nigeria’s energy policy). Furthermore, much-needed capacity for contextual heavy lifting just doesn’t exist at the Bank in sufficient qualities or quantities. There are virtually no career incentives to invest in knowing particular countries and their political economy dynamics well enough to be of use over years of executing on an industrial policy strategy.

Consequently, the go-to implementation strategy would likely be to projectize industrial policy to death under reams and reams of “best practice” technical policy prescriptions that can quickly scale globally.

Finally, historical institutional disdain for contextual knowledge means that, in all likelihood, the Bank’s recommended industrial policy strategies will not be informed by an objective understanding of the causes of economic underperformance in low-income countries. Reading the report, it’s hard to not conclude that the Bank still espouses a fundamental misreading of low-income countries’ economic histories over the last 60 years.

Consider this bit from the report (the answer to “why now” from the report’s perspective):

Three broad shifts in recent decades warrant a reexamination of the skepticism surrounding industrial policy. First, the talent available to governments has expanded substantially amid rising education levels globally. Second, the political environment in many countries has become more supportive of development objectives. While attribution is difficult, broad improvements in macroeconomic stability, growth, and health outcomes likely reflect a closer alignment of politics with development goals, rather than improvements in talent alone. As a result, many political systems today appear more capable of implementing industrial policies effectively and efficiently. Third, most economies are now open rather than closed. This openness narrows the scope of industrial policy—placing greater emphasis on public inputs—but also reduces the need for any single agency to control every policy lever.

All three claims call for a rebuttal. First, levels of education attainment among policymakers/politicians weren’t the binding constraint to successful industrial policies over the last several decades. For the most part, ideas, political instability (i.e., absence of durable developmentalist coalitions), external shocks, and over reliance on multilateral policy advice ranked far higher. In fact, there are cases, like Kenya, where the quality and ambition of policymaking arguably peaked in the early 1970s.

Second, it’s unclear what is meant by “a closer alignment of politics with development goals.” Is this a nod to post 1990s electoralism as a driver of successful policymaking? If so, this claim is also historically inaccurate. For example, most African countries’ education enrollment rates (and related ambitions) first peaked in the late 1970s at the tail end of postcolonial big picture developmentalism (when many were autocracies), before plummeting during the dreadful long decade of underdevelopment (1980-1995). The recent enrollment uptick under MDG/SDG inspired UPE policies were merely a return to the late 1970s trend. Political demand for development has always existed in low-income countries. The problem has been on the supply side (and global shocks). More importantly, when thinking about industrial policy, what deserves emphasis is not electoralism or regime types, but the degree and quality of government (i.e., state capacity). On this score, it is true that things have improved significantly over the last few decades.

Third, the choice of observable metric of success — the performance of export-oriented firms — unnecessarily compressed what it takes to succeed at industrial policymaking (in this quote it’s couched in the language of trade trade openness, but in the executive summary it’s more explicitly stated as export-oriented firms’ performance). Strictly speaking, it is true that export orientation is the best way to discipline firms that receive policy support and force them to invest in productivity improvements. However, there are multiple steps between choosing to execute export-oriented industrial policies and having successful global firms — from labor policies, to allocation of capital, to choosing, supporting, and disciplining national champions, to learning and technology transfer, to the development of national/regional value chains etc. These process may take more than a decade, and may at first yield uneven results across the multiple pieces of the puzzle — an interval and degree of variation in policy outcomes that are well outside the World Bank’s institutional/project attention span.

Instead of merely asserting that things are different now (which is true!) and then listing a slew of potential policy options, it would’ve been helpful if the report spent time on elements of state capacity (especially the ability to at once help specific firms/sectors and also discipline them) and political coalition building for successful industrial policymaking (including how this might be shaped by the presence of land thereof of heightened electoral competition). Everything else flows from these two factors in a highly contextualized fashion; and without a handle on both there’s very little analytical mileage we can get from abstract discussions of institutions, embedded autonomy, incentives, and accountability.

Overall, the report treats politics as sand in the gears, and emphasizes the need to insulate implementing agencies from politics (see Chapter 5 on getting institutions right). While this is true, it’s worth noting that the insulation of public agencies doesn’t just miraculously happen. Political developmentalist coalitions must agree to such an arrangement. In other worlds, politics is a core feature of industrial policymaking, not a bug. And the fact that the Bank is likely to default to the “apolitical” approach to industrial policy advise is good reason to be skeptical of any such programmatic endeavor from the institution.

III: Conclusion

In general, I think it’s a good thing that we now have an ideational accommodation of industrial policy as part of the developmentalist policy toolkit — but perhaps for different reasons than many would assume. Above all, I see this opening as a chance for African policymakers to embrace ambition, focus on their objective developmental needs, and adopt aggressively pro-growth policies that are contextually suitable. The context-dependent logics of industrial policy demand that African policymakers eschew policy extraversion. Now is not the time to dilute their development ambitions through decidedly subpar remote control industrial policy. Again, you can’t projectize industrial policy.

Lastly, and I cannot stress this enough, I hope that African policymakers don’t view the recent ideational shift on industrial policy as a license to gratuitously expand public sector participation in their economies at the expense of the private sector. Obviously, the African state still has a huge role to play in the region’s development journey. Absolutely no doubt about that. However, the region’s states must also support the private sector. The journey to mass job creation and broad-based development in the region will necessarily have to pass through the emergence of large private sector firms. It’s as simple as that.

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I: A long war is very likely on the cards; and its (negative) impacts will have long lags

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I: What explains the …

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I: Important lessons from the last commodity boom (2000-2014)

An important driver of Afric…

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Mahmood Mamdani’s latest book, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making and of the Ugandan State, consists of three tightly interwoven strands of inquiry. First, Mamdani uses his biography to explore themes related to the Asian Question in postcolonial East Africa as well as Uganda’s political and economic development. Second, the book offers an interesting meditation on leadership and the dilemmas of postcolonial state-building. Finally, Mamdani contrasts the roles of Idi Amin and Yoweri Museveni in midwifing Uganda’s political and economic underdevelopment. This review discusses each of these strands in broader perspective.

I: Idi Amin Dada beyond the headlines (making sense of 1970s Uganda)

I recommend Slow Poison to readers for one simple reason: it asks us to reconsider how we view leadership on the Continent. Instead of the standard shallow moralizing about African leaders that is prevalent in academia and the media, Mamdani asks us to carefully think through how personal background, domestic political and economic incentives, as well as the international environment interact to shape African leaders’ policy choices.

Such analysis is needed for us to make sense of African states’ current predicament and the best way forward. For example, despite their many failings, Africa’s Independence Generation did so much with so little. On average, these men and women were of a much higher calibre than Africa’s invariably complacent contemporary leaders. Their successes and failures provide important lessons for our times.

Mamdani is spot on when he writes that it was “at precisely their moment of triumph [that these leaders] lacked the resources to translate their vision into reality.” They lacked socio-cultural and political hegemony. They lacked control over their economies and the terms of their integration into the global economy. They lacked the human capital needed to run while others walked. And perhaps most importantly, they inherited terribly weak states that stood little chance in the face of neocolonial meddling and the many economic crises of the long decade from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Many are yet to reach Nkrumah’s proverbial political kingdom. Faced with these challenges, satisficing became unavoidable. And many leaders made (mostly understandable) mistakes.

Despite this general understanding, Mamdani’s subject, Idi Amin, is a really hard case to think through.

It’s relatively easy to analytically understand the actions (and mistakes) of leaders like Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, Tom Mboya, Jomo Kenyatta, Sekou Toure, Ahmed Ben Bella, Houphouet Boigny, or Kwame Nkrumah. It is much harder to do the same for leaders of Amin’s ilk. Yet Mamdani asks us to go there (and most readers will struggle with this, at first). And, on balance, I think his difficult ask is justified on the merits — even though I agree with Wallace Kantai that the Amin/Museveni contrast is sometimes overdone (more on this below).

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I: Wallowing in nostalgia is not a strategy

Early last year I urged us all to quickly move…

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I: Economics

(1) African economies will register strong nominal growth in 2026. But m…

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To close the year, this post reviews the calls I made early this year in my “Africa i…

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Thank you for being a regular reader of An Africanist Perspective. If you haven’t done so yet, please hit subscribe to receive timely updates on new posts along with over 31,000 other subscribers. All new regular content is free. Book reviews and the archives are gated.

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In The Second Emancipation, Howard French delivers a masterful exploration of the global political history of Africa in the first two thirds of the 20th century. French’s vessel is the biography of Kwame Nkrumah, which he uses to guide readers through a captivating and readily accessible journey through the rapidly changing world in which the former Ghanaian president lived.

I strongly recommend the book for the deeply-researched (intellectual) history of Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, the global decolonization movement, and the well-rounded interrogation of Nkrumah the man and politician. It’s easily my favorite book of the year.

This review will focus on what we can learn about leadership and development policymaking from Nkrumah’s tenure atop Ghanaian politics.

I: The wages of postcolonial decline and collapse of the quality of African leadership

A striking feature of contemporary Africa is the almost total lack of historically-aware and self-consciously strategic leaders. To be blunt, most African countries are led by two-bit rent-seekers with astonishingly low ambitions. The same leaders are fairly comfortable being at the bottom of the totem pole of global elites. You see this in how they unthinkingly batter away their countries’ natural resources, human capital, and market access for the proverbial trinkets. Too often you get the sense that they are simply not interested in addressing their societies’ problems.

In this post — and with reference to the life of Kwame Nkrumah — I argue that leadership matters, and that things weren’t always this bad on the Continent. There was a time when many (admittedly imperfect) African leaders were intrinsically motivated to be ambitious and willing to deploy whatever little leverage they had to expand their own agency, policy autonomy, and strategic independence — all with a view of improving their citizens’ living standards and their nations’ standing in the world.

My aim herein is twofold. First, it’s to shed some light on how we ought to define “good leadership” on Continent. Second, it’s to define how Africa’s leaders can help the region avoid a calamitous future as far as human welfare goes.

There’s no way to sugarcoat the current state of affairs on the Continent and what it means for the future. Africa is rapidly becoming the last world region to be ravaged by extreme poverty and its manifestations. Importantly, most African states remain weak and unable to secure their citizens, provide essential public goods and services, or create enabling conditions for commerce at scale. It’s my contention that coordinating out of this mess will require a much higher caliber of leaders than the Continent currently has.

For emphasis, the facts and figures quantifying decades-long policy failures across the Continent are grim. 600m people in the region lack access to power — this is over 80% of the global population without power (Africa represents 18% of global population). Only 20% of Africans use clean fuels to cook (those without access represent 43% of global total). Of the 58m primary school age children worldwide who aren’t enrolled, 33.8m are in Africa. An astonishing 60% of African 17 year olds are not in school. Furthermore, the region significantly lags the rest of the world on research — a reflection of the sorry state of higher education in the region. The atrocious levels of under-investment in education extend well beyond education. 31.7% of kids in the region are stunted (only South Asia records similar levels). Under 40% of Africans have access to piped water in their homes. The region’s economies remain largely informal, and create a mere 30% of the needed annual formal jobs. Over 80% of jobs are in the informal sector. It is no wonder that the last few years have seen young Africans protest their governments at risk of life and limb. A majority now openly support coups. The list goes on and on.

Sure, there has been some recent progress on key development indicators. Infant mortality rates are relatively lower (although still unconscionably high). Life expectancy is up. Despite enduring challenges to quality and access, education attainment levels are inching ever higher. And many countries continue to post economic growth rates that outpace their population expansion.

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I: Policymaking is fundamentally about balancing tradeoffs and setting clear goals, but can African policymakers have it all when it comes to electrification?

I love well-r…

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With reference to leading personalities, politics in post-independence Kenya can be periodized into three eras: the Jomo Kenyatta era (1963-1978), the Daniel arap Moi era (1978-2002), and the Raila Odinga era (2003-2025). As the founding president Kenyatta shaped Kenya’s postcolonial political settlement, the related elite ba…

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Foreign Policy magazine’s Fall 2025 issue has interesting essays on development. They are all worth reading, as they provide important perspectives on how the current geopo…

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I: Forcing energy-poor low-income countries to disproportionately focus on climate mitigation is anti-development

Charles Kenny, Vijaya Ramachandran and Guido Núñez-Mujica o…

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This is a follow up to earlier pieces that I wrote on development in an age of climate change; why (energy) poverty is not a viable climate strategy in the developing world…

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I: African economies desperately need lots and lots of formal sector jobs

The rate of informal employment in Africa is high, and basically hasn’t budged over the last 20 yea…

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I: All borders are arbitrary

All borders are artificial, and arbitrarily refl…

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Let’s be blunt. It’s fair to say that, relative to other African counties, contemporary Ethiopia and Li…

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This is the final installment in a four part series to mark the first anniversary of the June 25, 2024 protests. It offers a general commentary on how the current moment fi…

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This is the third installment in a four part series to mark the first anniversary of the June 25, 2024 protests. The first post discussed the state of the Kenyan economy u…

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