Replicating ‘Sources of Slow Growth in African Economies’

The most cited paper ever published by the Journal of African Economies is Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warners “Sources of Slow Growth in African Economies.” The paper advises that despite decades of slow growth in Africa there should be considerable optimism regarding Africa’s future; if it could have only managed policy and governance quality that equalled the average non-African developing economy its growth rate from 1965 to 1990 would have almost doubled. My attempt to purely replicate this conclusion fails. Adopting other developing country policies would have increased African growth, but by only 0.05 percentage points. Policy does have a strong influence on growth. Nevertheless, Africa grew more slowly than other developing countries not because of policy differences, which were in aggregate small, but because of its relatively unfavourable geography, changing demography and the poor health of its population. This change in finding now aligns the paper with the three other contemporaneous papers that investigated Africa’s slow growth performance and find that poor policy was a minor factor. JEL codes: O11, O13, O55, Q32, Q33, B40