Kirjahaku

Why Africa is Poor looks at the fragile economic and political situation in Africa and makes the quite controversial argument that the main reason Africa s people are poor is due to the choices made by their leaders. Dr Greg Mills draws extensively from his experiences running various presidential-level advisory teams across the continent and examines the policy choices that have stunted African development. In providing some answers to the conundrum of development, the book focuses on the way the global economy works, Africa s record and the choices made by its leaders, the role of the outside world and the global aid regime. It assesses whether the odds are in Africa s favour and identifies the areas where African leadership could make better choices."

Why do some states thrive, grow their economies and uplift their people, while others, facing similar challenges, slide into low growth, social dysfunction and failure? After decades of work on the ground in Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, bestselling author Greg Mills seeks to provide answers in Rich State, Poor State. On each continent he traverses, Mills interrogates the how and why. How did Botswana go from being one of the least-developed and poorest nations at independence to enjoying the highest rate of per capita growth of any country in the world? Why has South Africa failed to attain similar heights? How did the Baltic states achieve reforms that have positioned them among the best-performing economies in Europe? How did Vietnam overcome a traumatic past in favour of a rapid and positive development transformation? Why is Mexico the only large developing economy that competes with China in manufacturing? Drawing from interviews with current and former presidents, prime ministers and key government officials across the globe, as well as research from leading institutions to enrich his fieldwork, Mills contrasts the successes and the failures, and in so doing, seeks to determine a path for the next generation of leaders. Insightful and inspiring, Rich State, Poor State shows that with better choices, the right policies and the will to implement them, it is entirely possible to travel the road from poverty to prosperity.

State failure takes many forms. Somalia offers one extreme. A collapse of central authority as the outcome of a prolonged civil war, where authority descends into competing factions - warlords - around the spoils of local commerce, power and international aid. At the other end of the scale is Malawi under President Bingu. During his abbreviated second term in office, the country's economy collapsed as a result of poor policies and personalised politics. On the surface, save the petrol queues, it was stable; underneath, the polity was fractured and the economy broken. Between these two extremes of state failure are all manner of examples. This book uses field-work based case-studies of more than thirty countries, incorporating interviews with a dozen leaders, to disaggregate various state failures and identify instances of recovery - from Latin America, Asia and Africa, including Afghanistan, Congo, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, Somalia and Somaliland, Venezuela and Zimbabwe - while focusing on a key question: How do countries recover and what roles are there for insiders and outsiders?