Africa's Third Liberation: The New Search for Prosperity and Jobs.

• Author: Tupy, Marian

Africa's Third Liberation: The New Search for Prosperity and Jobs

Greg Mills and Jeffrey Herbst

Johannesburg, South Africa: Penguin Books, 2012, 248 pp.

The new millennium has been good to Africa. Its economy grew at an average annual rate of 4.9 percent between 2000 and 2008. Then came the financial crisis and growth dipped to 2 percent. Since 2009, the International Monetary Fund estimates growth has averaged 5.4 percent. Between 2001 and 2010, six out of the ten fastest growing economies were in Africa. This trend, the Fund predicts, will continue.

What was the impact of growth on the lives of ordinary Africans? "After steadily increasing from 51 percent in 1981 to 58 percent in 1999," the World Bank has recently found, "The extreme poverty rate fell 10 percentage points in ... [sub-Saharan Africa] between 1999 and 2010 and is now at 48 percent--an impressive 17 percent decline in one decade." That reduction in poverty is especially encouraging considering that the population of Africa rose from 375 million in 1980 to 823 million in 2010.

Contrary to some commentators, Africa's fortunes improved less because of high commodity prices and more because of the slow but steady spread of capitalism. Resources accounted for only about a third of Africa's newfound growth, according to the McKinsey report "What's Driving Africa's Growth?" Internal structural changes accounted for the rest, including reduction of inflation, foreign debt, budget deficits, taxes, and trade barriers, and improvements of the business and legal environments.

Africa's Third Liberation: the New Search for Prosperity and Jobs is a much-needed and unapologetic call for further structural reforms in sub-Saharan Africa. As Greg Mills and Jeffrey Herbst acknowledge, the environment for African economic development has been slowly improving. For example, both political freedom as measured by the Freedom House and economic freedom as measured by the Fraser Institute rose since the end of the Cold War.

Overall, however, African political and economic elites lack a comprehensive commitment to development. As the authors write, "If Africa's first liberation was from colonial and racist government, and the second from its liberators, the third is the change in focus of politics itself. Concentrating on economic development to the exclusion of much else is required." Too often, African elites "revert to populism, patronage and economic nationalism rather than venturing reforms that...