Should Africa Industrialize?

Abstract

Africa’s post-independence leaders looked to industrialization as the key to rapid economic growth. However, the state-led, import-substituting industries they created were frequently uncompetitive and unsustainable. Efforts to spur industrial development in Africa largely vanished with the economic collapses and adjustment programmes of the 1980s and 1990s.While the last two decades of the twentieth century were boom times for industrial development in low- and middle-income countries, industry was moving out of Africa. Between 1995 and 2008, manufacturing growth in developing economies was more than 6 per cent per year, in Africa it was about 3 per cent. Since 1980 industry in Africa has declined as a share of both global production and trade (UNIDO 2009), and today, Africa’s industrial sector is in many ways less advanced than in the first decade following independence. In contrast to much of the rest of the developing world Africa has ‘deindustrialized’.

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