Despite internal efforts, and a generous influx of development aid from donor nations and international financial institutions, Africa’s economy remains abysmally weak and accounts for less than 1.2 percent of the World’s Gross Domestic Products (World bank, 2021), even though more than 10 percent of the world’s population calls it home (UNDP, 2020). The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, beginning in the early 1970s, used different combinations of monetary and fiscal policy instruments that included loans and technical assistance to help spur development in the region but to no avail. By the late 1990s it became clear to all concerned that reform efforts in Africa have failed (Meredith, 2005); but why? Why has development proved so elusive in Africa? Is the absence of sustained economic growth despite massive assistance from donor states and windfalls from natural resources a result of native factors that are inhospitable to economic development? World Bank staff economists took the lead in seeking answers to these questions, and as a result numerous economic studies have since been commissioned and undertaken (Van de Walle, 2001). The results and policy recommendations vary.
In the main, economists tend to equate development with economic growth, and these growth models essentially regressed a measure of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) over a standard array of endogenous and exogenous variables believed to influence national income. The regression results invariably lend support to the usual expectations: the stock of physical capital, the level of human capital development, openness to international trade, political competition, level of inflation, and government expenditure, all presumed to have remarkable effects on economic growth (Klein and Luu, 2003). However, in most of these studies, the dummy variable that captures everything else outside the standard vectors are consistently found to be significant, thus giving empirical sustenance to the suspicion that there are certain African characteristics that are perhaps not malleable to the Western notion of development.