PARIS: With strong growth, a reduction in poverty and foreign investment, a number of recent studies have highlighted the African "economic miracle," but economists suggest the picture is more complicated.
Since the start of the decade, the world’s poorest continent has witnessed an economic boom. After a brief slowdown during the global economic crisis, growth this year is set to approach a steady five percent continent-wide.
"Africa’s growth acceleration resulted from more than a resource boom," consultancy firm McKinsey & Company said in a report published on Tuesday which analyzed the continent’s "likely staying power."
Jim O’Neill, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, suggested in an article in the Financial Times last month that South Africa, along with Nigeria and Egypt, could by 2050 join the BRIC group — Brazil, Russia, India and China — of emerging economic powerhouses.
Economic development is also boosting some of Africa’s smaller economies.
"The absence of raw materials has not stopped countries like Mali and Burkina Faso from recording good growth rates," said Senegalese economist Abdoulaye Diagne.
But for Bongani Motsa, an economist at South Africa’s Trade and Industrial Policy Strategies institute, exports of natural resources remain the principal engine for African growth, which means it is fragile.
Furthermore, rosy long-term predictions rest on the continent turning the page on a history of conflict, political instability, health epidemics and rampant corruption.
"Those obstacles are far from being removed," said Motsa.
"The lack of good governance remains total," said Léonard Wantchekon of the Benin-based Institute for Empirical Research in Political Economy.
In addition to economic growth, the question of development remains a critical one. Two recent studies have shown that poverty and inequality were being reduced.
"The conventional wisdom that Africa is not reducing poverty is wrong," said Maxim Pinkovsky and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, US academics who wrote one of the studies.
The economic growth supports the development of the middle class, said Alwyn Young of the London School of Economics in a second study.
"The real household consumption in sub-Saharan Africa is growing around 3.3 percent per year," Young said, saying this was higher than official statistics suggested.
According to Motsa, "African growth is not as sustainable as sometimes said." Recent food, economic and financial crises have already caused a return of inequalities and evaporation of the middle class.
Local governments lack strategies to achieve sustainable growth, with the absence of human capital the main handicap.
Problems such as poor infrastructure are "a real bottleneck on development," said Wantchekon.
In addition, poverty remains massive and the reduction has not yet been significant, said Diagne.
"In oil-producing countries like (Democratic Republic of) Congo and Gabon, growth has tended to profit just a tiny part of the population and thus increase inequality," he said.
