While most African countries have not made a lot of economic progress in the past 50 years, the future could well be quite different. A new publication by emerging markets investment firm The Renaissance Group, entitled The Fastest Billion, argues that Africa’s economy could grow to “first world status” if the continent manages to achieve sustained annual two percent growth for each of the next thirty years.
Africa has leap-frogged the slow development process of other countries in the area of mobile telephony, and we can expect to see it leapfrog in many other industries, including the automobile and aviation industries, according to the author, who predicts that Africa can become an economic competitor to leading countries such as Germany and the United States by the middle of the current century.
The economy of Kenya is predicted to grow by mid-century to be larger than the current economies of Mexico, Switzerland, Indonesia, Turkey and Korea. Thus by mid-century, Kenya’s economy is expected to be as large as the current tenth-largest economy in the world. To get things started, sub-Saharan economies are expected to grow by 4.8 percent overall in 2012.