Africa's latent assets | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal
Leander Heldring, James Robinson How will Africa adjust to the COVID pandemic (Arezki et al. 2021)? Can it overcome the deep negative legacies of the slave trade (Nunn 2008) and colonialism (Heldring and Robinson 2013, Michalopoulos and Papaioannou 2017, Roessler et al. 2020) or deal with the mounting challenges of climate change (Rohner 2021)? Are there reasons to be optimistic about Africa’s development futures, and if so what are they? In our research, we identify three latent assets which we argue suggest that there may be very different and much better economic times ahead for Africa (...