africa

12. The Political Origins of
Africa’s Economic Revival
Robert H. Bates*
Harvard University
Steven Block
Fletcher School, Tufts University
12.1 Introduction
Writing in the 1990s, William Easterly and Ross Levine (1997) famously labeled
Africa a “growth tragedy.” Less than 20 years later, Alwyn Young (2012) noted Africa’s
“growth miracle,” and Steven Radelet (2010) less effusively pointed to an Africa that
was “emerging” and noted the continent’s rising rate of economic growth, improving
levels of education and health care, and increasing levels of investment in basic
infrastructure: roads, ports, and transport. In this paper we address Africa’s economic
revival. In doing so, we also stress the political changes that have taken place on
the continent. Once notorious for its tyrants—Jean-Bedel Bokassa, Idi Amin, and
Mobutu Sese Seko, to name but three—in the 1990s Africa joined the last wave of
democratization; self-appointed heads of state were replaced by rulers chosen in
competitive elections. In this paper, we assert that the two sets of changes—the one
economic and the other political—go together, and that, indeed, changes in Africa’s
political institutions lent significant impetus to its economic revival.
* This paper draws materials from R. H. Bates and S. A. Block (2013), “African Agriculture: Institutional
Change and Productivity Growth,” The Journal of Politics 75(2): 372-384 and from R. H. Bates
(2008), When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late Century Africa, New York, Cambridge.
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