More Growth or Fewer Collapses? A New Look at Long Run Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa

Arbache, Jorge Saba ; Page, John

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ACCOUNTABILITY;    ACTUAL GROWTH;    AGGREGATE LEVEL;    AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW;    AVERAGE GROWTH;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-4384
RP-ID  :  WPS4384

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Low and highly volatile growth defineAfrica's growth experience. But there is no evidencethat growth volatility is associated to long term economicperformance.This result may be misleading if it suggeststhat volatility is not important for economic and socialprogress. In this paper we use a variant of the methoddeveloped by Hausmann, Pritchett, and Rodrik (2005) toidentify both growth acceleration and deceleration episodesin Africa between 1975 and 2005.The authors find thatAfrica has had numerous growth acceleration episodes in thelast 30 years, but also nearly a comparable number of growthcollapses, offsetting most of the benefits of growth.HadAfrica avoided its growth collapses, it would have grown 1.7percent a year instead of 0.7 percent, and its GDP percapita would have been more than 30 percent higher in 2005.The authors also find that growth accelerations anddecelerations have an asymmetric impact on human developmentoutcomes.Finally, our results suggest that it is easier toidentify the likely institutional and policy origins ofgrowth decelerations than of growth accelerations.