African Sufferi(ng)

It was 2001 - Journal of Development Economics(JDE) accepted a paper by Dr. Steven Block (Professor of international economics at Tufts University)named "Does Africa grow differently"? It was 2003 - cypriot economist Chris Papageorgiou was giving a seminar at Louisiana State University - "Africa does grow differently"(co-authored with Winford Masanjala)....oh! how lucky we are...took only 2 years to realize the truth!! Anyway, being an admirer of this young and jolly economist Prof. Papageorgiou it was not possible for me to skip the seminar(during my brief stay at Louisiana State University, the best thing ever happened was to meet my mentor,philosopher and guide Dr. Sudipta Sarangi; meeting Papageorgiou was second best opportunity for me)...the seminar was really good; it forced me to think, to think a lot actually - how can we possibly explain the negative growth rate of some countries even in the beginning of 21st century?! The World Bank and IMF treated Africa as just another continent for a long time and just ignored the possibility of adopting exclusive economic policies for Africa. However, blaming only World Bank and IMF may not ease the pressure - we are still looking for some "Black box" which will explain every single factor responsible for dismal economic condition in Africa.


Block and Papageorgiou both claimed that quality of economic institutions play a major role in this regard.Block's empirical results give us some astonishing facts - it is surprizing to note that increased stock of education does not affect the quality of economic institutions in Africa or abundance of raw materials in Africa actually reduces the quality of institutions!! Whereas Papageorgiou found out low quality of political institutions, lack of correlation between ethnic diversity and activities and frequent revolutions and coupe are some other factors along with low quality of economic institutions which have made the scenario worse.

However, one question still remains - what are the feasible way outs? (sometimes it reminds me of 70's intellectual Bengali films which dealt with the socio-political problems and analyzed those from innumerable viewpoints of different individuals but never spoke a single word about any sort of solution - whether utopian or realistic)....It's time to arrange a marriage between development economics and growth theory if we want to pursue much sought - after solutions.