Why has Africa been so much less successful than Asia in exporting manufactured goods?

Essay aus dem Jahr 2007 im Fachbereich Politik - Region: Afrika, University of Cape Town, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Sub-Saharan Africa is practically absent from the manufactured export scene and the ¿dynamics of export growth and its technological upgrading are completely bypassing the region¿ (Lall/Pietrobelli 2002: 25). While the East Asian emerging markets and recently China have been successful in the diversification of exports over the past decades, African(1) economies still remain almost totally dependent on their traditional export products. Their share of global manufactured exports is almost zero. Therefore it is ¿clear that Africa has suffered a chronic failure of economic growth [and export diversification]. The problem for analysis is to determine its causes.¿ (Collier/ Gunning 1999: 3-4) While some authors, as Wood and Mayer (2001), and Karshenas (2001), emphasize structural constraints limiting the process of structural transformation and export diversification - known as the resource-based thesis - other economists as Collier/Gunning (1999a), World Bank (2000), Lall/Pietrobelli (2002), Rodrik (1999) and Soludo (1998) explain Africäs low share of manufactured exports and the lack of industrialization mainly as policy-induced.

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1 The terms ¿Africä and ¿Sub-Saharan Africä (henceforth SSA) refer in this paper to the Sub-Saharan African countries except South Africa.