Economic Development for Africa South of the Sahara [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION By AUSTIN ROBINSON (President I.E.A. 1959-62) The Conference on Economic Development for Africa, held in Addis Ababa, represented the third of such regional conferences organized by the International Economic Association. The first, concerned with Latin America, was held in Rio de Janiero ; the second, concerned with East Asia was held in Gamagori in Japan. The central purpose of such conferences has been to bring together leading economists of the region to examine with specialists from outside the region the problems of economic development as they apply to that part of the world. In the case of the African conference, it was unique in another sense. It represented the first occasion on which academic economists from all over Africa had met together to discuss the problems of African development. It was the first opportunity for many of them to meet simultaneously their colleagues from other African countries and to discover from joint discussion how far the problems of the countries of Africa are similar and how far dissimilar. As a background to our discussions we persuaded the experts of the Economic Commission for Africa to prepare for us a general paper on African development and various authorities on different parts of Africa to write their views on the problems confronting the development of these particular areas. These various studies are printed here as Section I of the present volume. The ECA paper was exceptionally interesting in its attempt to use Mexico as a bench-mark of a country just reaching the stage of 'take-off'. (I shall not engage in argument regarding the detailed validity of that concept; those issues were very fully threshed out at another conference of the IEA.) Mexico, with agriculture representing only about 20 per cent of gross domestic product, despite an excess of primary exports over primary imports, and with some 18 per cent generated in manufacturing, was clearly far more advanced in most respects than any African country north of the Zambesi. Thus it was clear that African countries were starting in almost all cases from very low levels of development and of income per head and had a long way to go to reach 'take-off'. On the other hand all of these studies served to emphasize the very rapid current economic growth of most of the countries of Africa. ix