The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide an extraordinary vision of what global development should look like between now and 2030. Starting with the concept of sustainability, the SDGs go far beyond the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to incorporate a set of environmental and social-justice priorities that require national action at all levels of income. As agreed by 193 signatory nations at the September 2015 United Nations General Assembly, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/ transformingourworld) is meant to be universal, indivisible, and interlinked. In conventional development arenas like extreme poverty and hunger the SDGs also inspire, doubling down on the MDGs by defining success in absolute rather than relative terms. Global partners target an end to poverty in all its forms, for example, rather than a 50 percent reduction in extreme-poverty headcount ratios.

The UN's drive for universal norms and targets involved widespread public debate and painstaking negotiations and compromises between national governments. The process was simultaneously more transparent and much more difficult and convoluted than when the MDGs emerged from behind closed doors a decade and a half ago. Some widening in the scope of commitments was inevitable and also desirable, to accommodate sustainability goals and build a truly global coalition. But there was also widespread awareness as negotiations proceeded that fewer goals might allow for greater success. By the latter standard, the 2030 Agenda is daunting. With 17 global goals and 169 highly ambitious targets, the Agenda seems in danger of departing not just in scope but also in coherence from the elegant eight goals and 17 targets of the MDGs.

In practice, therefore, a great deal remains on the table in terms of shaping global action. This is true not just in the conventional sense of identifying costeffective approaches to individual targets but also in the deeper sense of operationalizing – and unavoidably, prioritizing – targets at the national and global levels. This book makes a vital contribution to what should be a collective effort to prioritize.

Introduction

Our analysis has been retrospective: Africa's economic growth over the period 1960–2000. The primary purpose in understanding Africa's past is to help guide its future. Our main conclusion from our review of Africa's past has been that while its opportunities were atypically difficult, its politics evolved in such a way that it largely failed to harness them. The politics was transmitted into the economy through syndromes: growth-constraining packages of policies, institutions, and behavior.

In this chapter we look forward. Opportunities, as we define them, are geographical characteristics and hence, for better or for worse, there is little one can do to change them. Africa can, however, make much better use of its opportunities and, where opportunities are adverse, mitigate their economic impact. We consider in turn the three big opportunity groups that we have used throughout the study – landlocked and resource-scarce, resource-rich, and coastal and resource-scarce countries. For each we ask two types of question. First, what proximately is needed in order for opportunities to be harnessed? For example, landlocked Africa needs better transport infrastructure. Second, what are the political underpinnings that would enable such proximate changes to be made and sustained? For example, what political structures would provide the incentive for neighboring countries to maintain the transport corridors that landlocked countries need?

As background, we stress four major lessons from our analysis of Africa's experience.

Introduction

Growth depends upon the interaction of opportunities and choices. A country, or an entire region, may fail to grow either because there are no opportunities, or because choices are made that preclude opportunities being taken. The stark phenomenon we are trying to understand is that for forty years Africa stagnated while other developing regions grew. This chapter attempts to explain this alarming phenomenon in terms of the distinctive opportunities open to the region and the distinctive choices which were made.

Before explanation comes description. The comparison of regional growth rates must surely seem a straightforward matter. In fact, especially for Africa, it is sensitive to apparently arcane choices. To date, in our view scholars have invariably got these choices wrong and so we must begin with a brief discussion of these issues.

The basic unit for reporting GDP and its growth is the nation: regional figures on GDP are built up from these observations at the level of the nation. The most widely cited regional growth rates come from the World Economic Outlook (WEO) of the IMF and the Global Economic Prospects (GEP) of the World Bank. In both cases, the regional figures are half-way houses on the road to estimates of the growth of global GDP. Necessarily, in such an approach, the growth rates of regional and global GDP are simply arrived at from the total level of GDP and its comparison with the previous year.

Introduction

We have seen that Africa's geography has distinctively shaped its opportunities. Two-thirds of Africa's population live in countries that are either dominated by natural resource wealth, or are landlocked and resource-scarce. Both of these conditions are difficult to cope with, and both are far more common in Africa than in other parts of the developing world. In this chapter we suggest that not only have Africa's opportunities been shaped by its geography, but that to a significant extent so have its choices.

Policy choices do not lend themselves to quantitative analysis: they are highly multifaceted with no obvious procedure for aggregation, and they are often continuous but ordinal, lying on the qualitative spectrum better–worse. In addition, individual variables often measure policy outcomes rather than policy settings: they become endogenous to growth. We have reduced this complexity to a manageable set of “syndromes” – patterns of policy choice that are plausibly causally prior to growth outcomes and that an economist would expect to be seriously dysfunctional for growth. This simplification has naturally come at the price of a substantial loss of information. However, as we saw in chapter 2, the syndromes are associated with a substantial part of Africa's growth shortfall. If this association is causal, which we shall investigate, then the loss of information is not overly severe, at least in terms of the impact of policies on growth. Attention then properly shifts to explaining policy choices, and here the syndrome structure provides a powerful focal point for analysis.

Overview

A collaborative effort of the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC), Harvard University, and Oxford University, the Growth Project was designed to produce the first comprehensive assessment by African research economists of the growth experience of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) in the post-independence period. At the core of the project is a tight integration of country-level research with global econometric evidence on economic growth. In this chapter we provide the building blocks of this approach and a perspective on the lessons it produced. The themes introduced here are developed in detail throughout this volume and in the accompanying volume 2 of country studies. In the course of our analysis we provide a road map to the remaining chapters of this synthesis volume.

Economic growth in Africa, 1960–2000

Africa's growth record appears in table 1.1, which focuses on the period from 1960 to 2000 and applies to all developing countries with continuous data. The post-1960 period corresponds closely to the era of political sovereignty in SSA (table 1.2). It is also by far the most intensively studied period in the global growth econometrics literature, reflecting the availability of comparable cross-country data on the contemporary nation-states of the developing world.

Simple cross-country averages suggest, at best, a story of modest progress. Human development indicators (HDIs) showed a decided improvement over the forty-year period, and real GDP per capita rose by 60 percent.

But, on a deeper look, the record is profoundly unsettling.