Africa in 2024

The bottom line is that Africa’s future, like its recent past, is likely to be uneven. There will be countries characterized by good governance and broadly shared economic growth, and those plagued by illegitimate autocrats, corruption, and violence. The biggest common challenge will come from an expanding population that will place extraordinary p

Africa’s collective GDP has grown sharply over time but is still small, constituting only a few percent of the world total. In recent years, overall growth has averaged between 3 and 4 percent, lower than it needs to be for most Africans to enter the middle class given the low starting point and the fact that the region’s population continues to gr

the promise of postapartheid South Africa has not been realized. For its part, Nigeria was a British colony for a century before gaining its independence in 1960. The country’s subsequent history can only be described as deeply troubled; its initial decades were marked by civil war, secessionist challenges, and military rule. Its politics seem to h

If colonialism constituted the first phase of contemporary African history, and the era of decolonization and the Cold War the second, modern Africa is now in its third phase. There has been some European, American, and, increasingly, Chinese investment in infrastructure and minerals. And there is periodic terrorism. But again, the continent is mor

All of this suggests a future for the Middle East that is like its past, defined by violence within and across borders, little freedom or democracy, and standards of living that lag behind much of the rest of the world.

For Latin America, this has been an era of democratic consolidation in many countries (including Mexico) that had long been run by a single party. It has also been a time in which a number of civil conflicts have been brought to an end, most notably in Colombia. But democracy and populism remain in tension in both Brazil and Argentina. Elsewhere, a

Some things are true of all successful countries. Predictability matters. Companies need to feel confident that their assets will not arbitrarily be seized, that they will be able to market and sell what they produce, and that they can bring a reasonable share of the profits back home. It is no less true that development can only take place (or adv