ERA

Africa stands at a critical juncture in its development, with immense potential driven by a youthful population, rich natural resources, and expanding consumer markets. However, while economic growth has rebounded post-pandemic, it remains below pre-pandemic levels, limiting progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), launched in 2021, presents a transformative opportunity to accelerate trade-led integration and drive inclusive, sustainable development.

Amid the fragmented and conflict-prone world, Africa faces many economic, social, and environmental challenges. They are unprecedented in scale, complexity, and interconnectedness, and they impede Africa’s attaining the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the African Union’s Agenda 2063. These global challenges render business-as-usual strategies unsustainable. A new approach is required to accelerate wealth creation, reduce inequality, and achieve more equitable and sustainable development.

The theme of the 2023 Economic Report on Africa is “Building Africa’s Resilience to Global Economic Shocks.” The report focuses on the impact of multiple and recurring global shocks on African economies. It examines how these shocks impede Africa’s prospects of reaching the targets set in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), how to achieve inclusive economic transformation and how to build resilience.

Addressing poverty and vulnerability in Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic” is the theme of the 2021 Economic Report on Africa. The report provides a perspective of the causes and consequences of increased poverty due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as from other shocks such as an oil price collapse, within a vulnerability–poverty–resilience framework, providing national estimates of people vulnerable to falling into poverty in different country clusters.

FRONT MATTER

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Africa is at a critical juncture in its development trajectory. Policies adopted now will determine how quickly the continent accelerates growth and creates prosperity for all. In 2015, African countries signed up to two important development agendas: the global 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), which aims to leave no one behind as countries develop, and the African Union’s Agenda 2063, which sets out a blueprint for the “Africa we want”. A decade away from the SDG endpoint, African countries continue to search for policy mixes to help accelerate the achievement of these targets.

Although Africa’s growth has, since independence, been driven mainly by primary production and export, its growth resurgence since 2000 has benefited from improvements in macroeconomic management, good governance, institutional reforms and reduction in armed conflicts such that, apart from primary commodities, manufacturing, modern financial and telecommunications services and tourism are beginning to make significant contributions to growth.

African countries have a real opportunity to capitalize on their resource endowments and high international commodity prices, as well as on opportunities from changes in the global economy to promote economic transformation through commodity-based industrialization and to address poverty, inequality and unemployment. If grasped, these opportunities will help Africa promote competitiveness, reduce its dependence on primary commodity exports and associated vulnerability to shocks and emerge as a new global growth pole.

The 2014 Economic Report on Africa builds on the previous year’s report, which made the case for commodity-based industrialization. It calls on the continent to refocus its economic development strategies on industrial-ization, particularly on the means for formulating and implementing efective industrial policy. In the past, most African countries pursued industrial policy with mixed results.

This Report examines and provides analysis on the critical elements of effectively fostering industrialization and hence structural transformation based on an extensive review of experience with industrialised countries and Africa’s post-independence attempt at industrialization. Ten country case studies were also conducted to shed light on industrializing through trade. The findings from this exercise informed the policy recommendations contained in this Report.