africa

Africa at a Fork in the Road: Taking Off or Disappointment Once Again?
In Asia, as de Janvry and Sadoulet (2010) showed, the structural transformation’s
development paths of most countries followed closely the “normal” pattern represented
by the international cross-sectional regression line in the upper left panel of
the Figure. 9 A fall in the agricultural employment share was accompanied by a rise
in average per capita income (the arrows representing the various countries’ time
paths tend to be parallel to the “normal pattern”). Workers leaving agriculture were
moving into more productive jobs.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, a majority of countries stagnated between 1960
and 2000 but one nonetheless observes in these countries a dramatic fall in the
share of agriculture in the labor force (lower left panel of Figure 5.1). The countries’
time paths tend to be vertical, reflecting the fact that the movement out of agriculture
occurred with no increase in average per capita GDP. What this means is that
agricultural workers were not pulled into more productive jobs outside agriculture
but rather pushed out of agriculture by lack of income opportunities. The resulting
rural-to-urban migration process in much of SSA, prior to the early 2000s, was
accurately described by Lipton (2004) as a “migration of despair.” 10 The contrast
between the generally successful structural transformation and migration process in
Asia and the flawed structural transformation and migration process in SSA, before
the turn of the century, is quite dramatic. The former contributed to shared growth
while the latter was both a symptom and a cause of stagnation.
Is there any evidence of a more “normal,” less flawed, structural transformation
in SSA during the present growth spell? If observed, this phenomenon could be
highlighted as an element consistent with inclusive growth. In order to determine
whether such tendency indeed occurred, I gathered the most recent observations
on the share of employment in agriculture and constant per capita GDP available
for any sub-period from 2000 on. 11
I was able to identify 14 SSA countries for which at least two annual observations
were available between 2000 and around 2010. Figure 5.2 presents the time paths
(in the form of arrows) of the structural transformation undergone by each of these
countries. As can be seen, the number of observations and time spans varies, and
therefore the impressions given by the Figure must be carefully interpreted. However,
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