Chalk and cheese? Africa and the lessons of Asian development

The World Bank's 1993 report on The East Asian Miracle prompted a wave of comparative research aimed at extracing practical lessons for African countries from the development achievements of large parts of Asia in the late twentieth century. Increasingly, however, researchers questioned the relevance of Asian experience to the African predicament, pointing to systematic contrasts between the two continents with respect to historical circumstances, geographical constraints, and political cultures. This paper briefly surveys the comparative literature, assesses some of the arguments, and discusses the role of ideology in the debate. By the early 1990s it was evident even to the most sceptical of observers that the old 'Third World', in the sense of an equatorial belt of stagnant, poverty-ridden countries stretching from Latin America through Africa to South and Southeast Asia, was no more. In Southeast Asia Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, following the lead of Singapore at the heart of their own region and of Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea further north, had all been developing rapidly, according to almost every conceivable (non-political) measure of development, for more than two decades. A whole new vocabulary, in fact, had been invented to characterize them: 'Newly Industrializing Countries', 'Asian Tigers', the 'East Asian Miracle'. The economic rise of neighbouring Vietnam, and of course China, was confidently foreseen. At the same time it was also becoming clear that this miracle had its antithesis in the 'Growth Tragedy' (Easterly and Levine 1995) of Sub-Saharan Africa, where during the 'lost decade' of the 1980s per capita income had actually fallen at a rate of more than one per cent per annum (Stein 1995:1). A negative 'African Dummy' had been identified as a statistical predictor of comparative national economic performance (Barro 1991), and Sub-Saharan African was already being identified as the site of 'underdevelopment's last stand' (Chege 1995). Asia-Africa comparative development studies The World Bank's well-known 1993 report on The East Asian Miracle; Economic growth and public policy summarized the achievements of East and Southeast Asia, offered a canonical explanation for them, and prompted a wave of further comparative research aimed at extracing practical lessons from the Asian development experience in the late twentieth century. According to this report, the eight 'High Performing Asian Economies' (HPAEs) Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia had succeded by a number of common means: by ensuring low inflation and competitive