World Bank Document - Africa Infrastructure Knowledge Program

The categories shown in map 1.2 are defined as follows:
The Legacy of History 11
Middle-income countries have GDP per capita in excess of $745 but
less than $9,206. Examples include Cape Verde, Lesotho, and South
Africa (World Bank 2010).
Resource-rich countries are low-income countries whose behaviors are
strongly affected by their endowment of natural resources (Collier
and O’Connell 2006). These countries typically depend on minerals,
petroleum, or both. A country is classified as resource rich if primary
commodity rents exceed 10 percent of the GDP. South Africa is not
classified as resource rich, using this criterion.
Low-income, fragile states face particularly severe development challenges,
such as weak governance, limited administrative capacity, violence,
or the legacy of recent conflict. Countries that score less than
3.2 on the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Performance
Assessment (WBI 2004) belong to this group. Some 14 African countries
are in this category.
Low-income, nonfragile states are those that have GDP per capita
below $745 and are neither resource rich nor fragile.
Table 1.1 shows how all the countries in the study are categorized and
also notes whether they are coastal or landlocked.
The most significant feature of Africa is that it has a much larger proportion
of low-income countries than the rest of the developing world.
An important element of this poverty is that nearly one-third of African
countries are classified as low-income, fragile states that have recently suffered
from major political and economic trauma. But even its resourcerich
countries have an average GDP per capita that is only 70 percent of
that of the lower-middle-income developing countries in the rest of the
world (table 1.2).
African countries share some common economic features. Thirtyseven
percent of their populations lives in cities, with little variation
among the four country types. Agriculture accounts for about a third of
the GDP, on average, again with relatively little variation among the
country types. But other features are not shared so equally: for example,
the share of land available for agriculture varies from a low of
29 percent for the low-income, fragile states to 63 percent for the
middle-income countries. The trade share of GDP ranges even more
widely, from 120 percent for low-income countries to 39 percent for the
low-income, fragile states (World Bank 2009). 2 Together with