Review: How Africa Works - by Oliver Kim

Joe Studwell Turns To Africa

How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Developmental Frontier, by Joe Studwell. Atlantic Monthly Press. 2026. When Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works came out in 2013, it was a book deeply out of consensus. In an age of randomized control trials and micro-interventions, it resurrected macro policies—land redistribution, industrial policy—that had virtually disappeared from mainstream development economics. Moreover, it returned East Asia, the only developing region in the world to successfully make the postwar climb out of poverty, back to the center of debate. Thirteen years…

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