There has been a chronic failure among economists to explain growth in Africa. The methods and analytical angles they have used to explain relative failure in Africa were conceived in the 1990s, but these were unsuitable for explaining growth in the 1960s or growth since the 2000s.
There is no denying that there was an economic failure in many African economies and that this decline took place during the postcolonial period. But it did not coincide with the whole period. “Postcolonial period” and “economic failure” have been equated in literature that attempts to explain growth in postcolonial Africa. They should not be.
This erroneous stylized fact provided the impetus for a literature that compressed a history that moved from explaining the African growth shortfall to explaining the gap in GDP per capita between African economies and the rich countries in the rest of the world.
