Book Description

This report offers new perspectives on sub-Saharan Africa's economic experience in the 1980s. That experience is often perceived as one of crisis and decline caused largely by hostile external factors. By putting Africa's extraordinary difficulties in the 1980s in a longer-term and global perspective, the report suggests that external factors may have been less hostile than supposed and less culpable in explaining the crisis. Moreover, the report shows emerging signs of economic improvement since the mid-1980s. This different view of the 1980s puts Africa's future in a fresh perspective - with a brighter prospect of recovery and growth. The report suggests that programs of economic reform and adjustment have helped African countries begin to improve their economic performance. Between 1983 and 1988, over half the countries of the region began, one after the other, to initiate policy reforms to favor increased efficiency in the use of scarce resources and to strengthen their competitiveness. This wave of reform arose largely from the crisis facing Africa. But an important feature of the movement toward policy reform and orderly structural adjustment is that Africans accepted the principal responsibility for their economic decisions and destiny.