ABSTRACT
Africa’s economic growth performance has attracted a lot of attention from researchers and analysts across the disciplines. In an attempt to understand Africa’s economic growth experience, many studies have been conducted and have offered different explanations for the observed growth patterns. Since the 1980s, when the impact of Africa’s ‘growth failure’ became visible and incontrovertible, the challenge that has occupied most researchers and analysts has been how to explain this phenomenon. As has been observed, “Explaining Africa’s slow growth in the second half of the 20th century remains a major challenge to economists and other analysts” (World Bank, 2000 : 23). This challenge has actually become more pronounced in the current period when most African countries have recorded sustained economic growth, with serious questions being asked about whether this growth is another ‘false start’ in what has come to be known as the Africa Rising narrative (ARN). Despite a wealth of empirical studies on Africa’s growth experience, it is evident that explaining it has proved to be as elusive as achieving sustained growth.
