Is Economic Growth and Development Realizable for Africa? – Review of Asian Countries: A Theoretical Perspective

There has been large a reservoir of papers spawned about African countries and the degrading but the real state of their economies. The African continent has seen under-industrialization, scaring rates of poverty, low levels of education, low levels of skilled labour force and high rates of diseases. After the overwhelmingly uproar for independence averagely 50 years ago, most countries in the continent still make ends meet under the mercy hands of the West and China. Africa has the highest poverty rate of 422,358,131 people living as of December 2018 (World Poverty Clock). The economic growth of Asia offers massive encouragement that economic growth is not a fantasy. Most countries in Asia have risen to overcome their gloomy economic situations. Countries such as Japan and South Korea have overturned war torn and hopeless economic situations into globally competitive countries. Singapore, a country without a single natural resource and with a diversity of people, has been able to achieve economic growth. China has managed to pull over 800 million people out of the grips of poverty in the past four decades, a feat which many pundits consider as a massive economic miracle. The main aim of this paper is to review the economic growth and developmental strategies of some Asian countries including Japan, South Korea, Singapore and China and in that regard make policy recommendations for sub-Saharan Africa. The regional choice is because Asia is indisputably the fastest growing economic region in the world contemporarily, both in terms of GDP and Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). In addition, the choice for the selected countries is because the countries under consideration were in a way or the other once in an economic crisis just as many countries in sub-Saharan Africa