Economic Report on Africa 2000

Africa made impressive economic progress in the 1990s. In the second half of the decade real GDP growth averaged 4% a year, and several countries sustained double-digit growth. The climate became more conducive to domestic and foreign investment. Capital markets broadened and deepened. Demand for African manufactured goods increased in Europe and the United States, and export growth nearly doubled.

Despite nearly a decade of reforms in many African countries, economic growth remains fragile, and there has been little progress in reducing absolute poverty. That is the starting point for this report, which stresses that on current trends Africa will not achieve the target of reducing poverty by half by 2015. With this in mind we propose a new development agenda for Africa to kick-start growth and reduce poverty—an agenda based on the need for a structural transformation of African economies.

That transformation requires renewed emphasis on modern agriculture as a basis for resource-based industrialization. Agriculture must get new attention, both in international development cooperation and in domestic resource allocation. So must resource-based industrialization, possible only with a level playing field in international trade.