Old Problems and New Realities in Africa - - and the role of Development Cooperation

The fact that the commodity super cycle of the first decade of the 2000s did not result in a larger and more absorbing labor market is leading to concerns of the direction the countries are 5 Banerjee, Abhijit and Duflo, Esther (2019): Good Economics for Hard Times. [...] Much of the writing on the contribution that labour makes to economic growth is either about dependency ratios (which are increasing in China, the Asian Tigers and the West) or the potential of a demographic dividend, which is particularly important when considering the future of Africa. [...] The former compares the number of children and elderly to the size of the working-age population. [...] Since 2010, the value of intra-African trade has hovered around an average which is less than a quarter of the average value of the trade between Africa and the rest of the world. [...] Between 2014 and 2016, changes in rainfall patterns due to climate change and the ensuing energy crisis negatively impacted on the agricultural and industrial sectors, and more recently, the COVID-19 epidemic was to blame for the growth slowdown in 2020 and 2021.