Despite dramatic progress in a number of areas, global poverty is increasingly concentrated in Africa. This is from a long survey in The Economist:
In many ways, there has never been a better time to be born African. Since 1960, average life expectancy has risen by more than half, from 41 years to 64. The share of children dying before their fifth birthday has fallen by three-quarters. The proportion of young Africans attending university has risen nine-fold since 1970. African culture is being recognised worldwide; in the 2020s African authors have won the Booker prize, the Prix Goncourt and the Nobel prize for literature. . . .
In 1960 GDP per person in Africa, adjusted for the different costs of goods in different places (so-called purchasing-power parity, or PPP), was about half of the average in the rest of the world. Today it is about a quarter. Then the region was roughly on a par with East Asia. Today East Asians have average incomes seven times higher than those in sub-Saharan Africa. . . . On current trends Africans will make up over 80% of the world’s poor by 2030, up from 14% in 1990.
Another article discusses the problem of corruption:
The closeness of business and politics also helps explain why there are so few African entrepreneurs of global standing, and so few globally competitive African firms. It is hard to become a legitimate billionaire when wealth depends on politics. It also encourages Africans with cash to stash it offshore. Perhaps 30% of African wealth is held outside the continent, compared with a global average of 8%, according to (somewhat old) estimates by Gabriel Zucman, an economist.
Some people worry that America is becoming a bit more like Africa. In recent years, business success in America has come to increasingly depend on political connections. If you watch one of those cable business channels, you will notice much more discussion of whether or not a given CEO is liked by the president. I don’t recall political connections being so important when I was young.
