Africa’s Infrastructure-Led Growth Experiment Is Faltering. It Is Time to Focus on Agriculture - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Over the past few decades, several low- and middle-income economies in Africa have sought to turbocharge growth by adopting an export-led economic model premised on heavy investments in infrastructure and building up domestic manufacturing capacity. But this strategy has often not produced the economic gains that have been promised for a variety of reasons. The continued emphasis on infrastructure investments fails to account for the fact that even those African countries that have invested a great deal in infrastructure continue to lag other countries in Asia (like Bangladesh) in key manufacturing sectors like textiles regardless of infrastructure quality. In addition, this approach overlooks the fact that African countries do not have the same comparative advantages as the Asian countries that perfected and popularized the export-led growth model: while those Asian countries had an abundance of low-wage labor, wages in Africa are typically higher than those of other countries at comp

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• Abinaya Dinesh