Opinion
Will Africa leave the World Bank behind?
By Nicholas Norbrook
Governments across the continent are looking for new development models after the policies of privatization and liberalization seem to have run their course.
The arrival of Jim Yong Kim as president of the World Bank bearing promises of a cultural revolution comes at a critical time for Africa’s prospects.
Africa is now the world’s fastest-growing continent, however, questions about policy, the past failures to develop viable industries and reduce youth unemployment and inequality continue to remain the subject of fierce debate.
That argument pits advocates of a more state-led development strategy, which has produced impressive results in East and South Asia, against the veteran advocates of market economics and liberalization – the old ‘Washington consensus’ pushed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1980s.
The terms of the debate are shifting, it seems. World Bank vice-president for Africa Makhtar Diop is quoted to have said in 2012: “If you look at the structure of the economies in Africa 10 years ago and today, there hasn’t been much change.” Africa continues to be a producer of raw materials and an importer of finished goods.
So what can change the structure of African economies? Has the World Bank been helping or hindering African chances of following Asia’s great industrial leaps?
Some African leaders have already made up their minds. Taking Asia as inspiration, and increasingly using Asian finance as development capital, they have junked important elements of the ‘Washington consensus’ in favor of a strong developmental state.
Ethiopia’s late Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, a theoretician of the need to reclaim the state, was most explicit in his rejection of complete faith in the market: “Developing countries face formidable market failures and institutional inadequacies which can adequately be addressed only by an activist state.”
