james_nicoll

It actually rose, didn't it?

(Checks.) These figures give projected 77% growth from 2002 to 2012.

Poverty is dramatically down over a similar period too:

Could simply be that Congo (and affected surrounding countries) contribute little to the total GNP of Africa. Using 2008-2010 numbers and adding the two Congos they contribute about 1.5%. That could certainly be hidden by overall growth.

DR Congo has 7% of Africa's population but only 2% of its GDP, and the war finished eight years ago so most of the economic damage had been done earlier than the last decade. Also as my former colleague has chronicled, though the war sucked in most of the neighbouring countries and a few more besides, it was actually fought almost entirely in the DRC.

the war finished eight years ago

But it doesn't show up in the 1998 to 2003 stats, which is what surprised me.

Where did you find those numbers?

No, you're quite right about the dates of the wars. I was confused when you mentioned 'stats' which for me means actual figures. But I agree that the graph doesn't show the wars (either Congo, 1996 to 2003, or indeed Sudan, 1983-2003) dragging down the continent as a whole, for reasons we have discussed elsethread.

From the figures I cite above, Angola and (less importantly) Equatorial Guinea can expect to treble their GDP in the 2002-2012 period, and Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Mozambique, Chad, Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana, Rwanda, and Sudan should see theirs more than double. Nigeria has the third largest economy in Africa; combined with the two larger ones, South Africa and Egypt (whose economies are forecast to grow by a measly 48% and 65% in the 2002-2012 period) you have accounted for almost half the continent's GDP.

Because wars in Africa tend to be fought on land, but international commerce tends to go by sea, there's not a big dampening economic effect from conflict as there was in Europe up to the mid-20th century (or the former Communist world in the 1990s). The exception perhaps is Somalia, though the relationship there between piracy and land-based fighting is rather complex.

I remember being struck by that animation that was going around a while back of the worldwide evolution of various human-development indices over the 20th century, and particularly that one did not see an enormous retrogression associated with World Wars I and II.

I managed to miss this. Do you still have a URL?

The URL maddeningly escapes me.

Googling revealed nothing except the dismaying fact that the fourmilab.ch guy was at some point into racial-eugenic IQ fretting.

...ah, here we go:

http://www.gapminder.org/

And, note, in things like the life-expectancy/wealth animation, you can see effects of the world wars, but they seem to be local and short-lived.

Thank you. It seems I'll have to spend a while on that site before I have something intelligent to say about it.

Just as a math footnote, over the last 15 years that looks like an annual GDP growth for the continent of 1.5%, which lags the developed world. Which just indicates that the West has more sophisticated kleptocracies, of course.

I'm 99% sure that those figures take inflation into account.

I believe that US GDP growth over 1996-2011 averaged 2.5%, inflation-adjusted.

Of course, raw GDP isn't a good measure of the wealth of an area--even leaving aside questions of income equality (on which the US, of course, is a wretched example), GDP include a lot of wealth that leaves the country. Several of Africa's richest nations are built around fortunes in mineral extraction (oil).

Just noodling a bit. 1.5% growth is a lot better than none.

It's a lot more than 1.5% - as I mentioned, the GDP was inflation-weighted already.

Take a look here:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/01/daily_chart
and you'll see it's averaged around 5%, with some countries a lot higher.

Here's the calculation I did, based on the chart you posted above:

GDP per capita in 1995 was ~1590. In 2006, it was ~1950. That's an increase of 22% in 11 years. I miscalculated the percentage--that's actually 1.82% annually. (I think I originally calculated based on a 15-year span.) Again, that's very good.

The Economist chart you cite here is based on the large countries--note that it excludes countries with < 10MM population. I would expect the larger countries of both Asia and Africa to have higher urbanization rates, and everyone knows that cities create wealth, which is also good.

Interesting. Looking at those numbers it looks like Zimbabwe (way to go Mugabe) is the only country that have had negative growth (-25% or -14% w/ projected numbers). Even Liberias disasterous civil war in 2003 could only limit their growth to 26% (using the projected 2011/2012 numbers).

I'd expected much worse numbers for say Rwanda, Congo or Eritrea but I suppose one-off bad years influence perception and news reporting much more than all the other years of steady 5%/year growth.

What really jumped out at me was that Equatorial Guinea, which was the poorest country in the world when I first started paying attention to these things (after the Nguema regime had massacred over a quarter of the population in the 1970s) now has the highest per capita GDP in Africa, level with most EU countries - though of course horribly unevenly distributed.

Oil discovery will do that. Wikipedia says the GDP *doubled* in 1997. GDP/capita nominal of $20,000... but 70% live under $2/day.

Wikipedia also says "Pre-independence Equatorial Guinea counted on cocoa production for hard currency earnings. It had the highest per capita income of Africa in 1959."

Easy to bounce around when you have under 700,000 people.

Why would you expect worse numbers for Rwanda? It's been stable and fairly successful economically this century.

A vague memory of semi-recent economic trouble due to IIRC freefalling tea and coffee prices. Googling around a little it looks like it could have been accociated with the flat growth in 2003 but I'm not sure.

Sneaky you...

I'm pretty sure much of Africas economy have been growing at a rapid rate for much of the last decade. My WAG is that should come out as overall growth.

Some other option -- Africa's GDP is very hard to measure.

Does following rezendi's journal count as cheating in this context ?

Following any source of information about Africa more recent than 1979 is not only cheating, it may count as genre-treason.

The thing that convinced me (probably about five years ago) that my impression of Africa was wrong was finding out from the BBC that there was an annual African film festival.

We have one of those in Montreal now, fwiw.

I was betting it's increased.

Alistair Reynold's got a novel coming out in a year about an African neartopia.

Up indeed it is!

I knew it had risen, but I didn't know how much it had risen.

Grew by 10% or more in real terms. And now to check comments...

Yes, that was really visible to me in Ethiopia and Uganda.

Are we living in the lead-up to Raphael Carter's The Fortunate Fall?

Probably not. We're living in a lead-up to a world where people from everywhere are onstage.