Fuente : World Bank
http://www.worldbank.org

Commentary: How To Help Africa Escape The Poverty Trap

/noticias.info/ The earthquake and tsunamis that hit Asia on December 26 2004 reminded us of our shared humanity. It has also stirred a rivalry among official donors, whose promises of assistance now exceed $3 billion. Yet this disaster must not divert attention from habitual calamities: Asia's disaster has left thousands of orphans, but Africa contains some 12 million children orphaned by AIDS, comments Martin Wolf of The Financial Times.

What is to be done? Answering that question is the task set for the Commission for Africa, established by the British government. The 17 commissioners, nine of whom are Africans, are preparing a report aimed at the summit of the group of eight leading high-income countries in Scotland in June. It is expected to conclude with a call for doubling aid to the troubled continent, which amounts to at least an extra $20 billion a year.

This report is not yet in the public domain. But another detailed analysis, which also calls for vastly more aid, is already available. This is a paper by Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University and a number of co-authors [Ending Africa's Poverty Trap, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2004, vol.1]. The core of their argument is three-fold: first, the world has agreed to the "millennium development goals", a set of targets that are to be achieved by 2015; second, Africa has no chance of meeting such goals, because it is stuck in a "poverty trap"; third, a large increase in external resources, married to a comprehensive development program, would allow Africa to escape the trap.

The argument for a "poverty trap" is that Africa's current poverty leads to very low national savings which, given population growth, generate low or even negative growth in real incomes per head. In this situation, argue the authors, no plausible action by African countries alone can start the sustained rapid growth on which Asia's success has been built. Creating this trap, argue Sachs and his colleagues, are five structural handicaps: Africa's very high transport costs and small market size; its low-productivity agriculture; an exceptionally high disease burden; a long history of malign external interventions; and very slow diffusion of technology from abroad. Given all these constraints, not to mention the fastest population growth in the world, a gross national savings rate of about 11 per cent does not begin to be enough. Rapid resource depletion may even make net investment close to zero. Africa, in short, is stuck.

What is needed to exit the trap, it is argued, is a "big push" that would last some two decades. The push would come in seven areas: raising rural productivity; tackling the disease burden; making primary education universal and expanding secondary education; financing urban development; mobilizing science and technology; gender equality; and regional integration. What would all this cost? The aid, argue the authors, will need to be between 20 and 30 percent of gross domestic product in many countries. For the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, the authors talk of an additional $25 billion a year over and above the $19 billion provided in 2002. If the whole of sub-Saharan Africa were to receive 25 percent of GDP, the total would be $90 billion - and so a quadrupling of current net flows.

The big question for advocates of additional aid is not whether the rich can afford it, but whether the poor can use it. There are at least two big dangers: the first is that aid will crowd out the exports on which longer-term growth depends; the second is that high levels of aid will encourage corruption, bad policy and waste. Yet the option of doing nothing is worse. Greater aid does carry risks. But its absence brings dreadful certainties. Let us manage the risks, not live with the certainties, Wolf concludes.

notas_de_prensa_archivo