africa

Africa at a Fork in the Road: Taking Off or Disappointment Once Again?
The first column shows that, across developing countries, both “growing out” and
“growing up” are strongly positively correlated with increases in value added across
the sector. The second column is calculated without the major natural resource
exporters, in view of the unique economic pathways often experienced by such
countries. 1
The third and fourth columns restrict the sample to African economies, of which 24
have adequate data for inclusion. An inspection shows that Zimbabwe is a significant
outlier due to its collapse in both yields and value added during the 2000s, so
the observation for that country is dropped from the regression in column 4. The
coefficient on yield just misses 5 percent significance levels, but is consistent with
the value for the broader developing country sample in column 2. The coefficient
on area harvested is significant at the 5 percent level, although with a slightly lower
coefficient than in column 2. It would be unwise to draw unduly strong conclusions
from a cross-sectional regression with limited degrees of freedom, but a plausible
interpretation of this result is that both yields and area drove value added growth
in Africa during the 2000s.
Table 26.2 examines a similar set of correlations, but now with agricultural value
added per worker as the dependent variable. Again, the first two columns examine
a broad sample of developing economies while the remaining columns cover an
African subset. The regressions include (log) initial value added per worker as an
explanatory variable, and the full developing country sample captures the strongly
significant pattern of divergence already suggested in Figure 26.4. Countries with
twice the initial level of output per worker are estimated to have a 0.6 percent faster
annual growth rate over the period. The coefficient on yields is similar to the results
from Table 26.1, while the coefficient on area harvested drops considerably and is
less statistically significant, especially in column 2, which again excludes natural
resource exporters.
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