The world’s fastest-growing continent

Aspiring Africa

Pride in Africa’s achievements should be coupled with the determination to make even faster progress

Mar 2nd 2013

 

 

对非洲成就的骄傲应该伴随更快增长的决心。

CELEBRATIONS are in order on the poorest continent. Never in the half-century since it won independence from the colonial powers has Africa been in such good shape.

自独立以来从未有过现在的良好状况。

Its economy is flourishing. Most countries are at peace. Ever fewer children bear arms and record numbers go to school. Mobile phones are as ubiquitous as they are in India and, in the worst-affected countries, HIV infections have fallen by up to three-quarters. Life expectancy rose by a tenth in the past decade and foreign direct investment has tripled. Consumer spending will almost double in the next ten years; the number of countries with average incomes above $1,000 per person a year will grow from less than half of Africa’s 55 states to three-quarters.

经济增长，大多数国家处于和平状态，读书而不是参军的儿童创记录。手机，艾滋，寿命预期，外商直接投资，消费，人均收入这些都非常可观。

Africans deserve the credit. Western aid agencies, Chinese mining companies and UN peacekeepers have done their bit, but the continent’s main saviours are its own people. They are embracing modern technology, voting in ever more elections and pressing their leaders to do better. A sense of hope abounds. Africans rightly take pride in conferences packed with Western bankers keen to invest in their capital markets (see article). Within the next few months MasterCard will have issued South Africans with 10m debit cards. Even the continent’s politicians are doing a bit better, especially in economic management and striking peace deals. Average GDP growth is humming along, at about 6%. Governance is improving: our correspondent visited 23 countries to research this week’s special report and was not once asked for a bribe—inconceivable only ten years ago.

非洲的救世主是非洲人自己。

 

This is a welcome transformation, but it is still incomplete. The danger is that Africa settles for today’s pace of change. Only if Africans raise their ambitions still further will they reach their full potential. They need to take on the difficult jobs of building infrastructure, rooting out corruption and clearing the tangle of government regulation that is still holding them back. And they should hurry.

变革仍然不充分，需要 改进基础设施，根治腐败，理清政府管理。

Don’t dawdle

 

One reason is that so much more remains to be done. Poverty may have become less visible in Africa’s capitals but it remains widespread. The battle against hunger has not been won. The spread of wealth is uneven and winners from today’s boom all too often rush to fortify their gilded positions inside guarded compounds.

城市里的赤贫现象减少但是乡村依然普遍，与饥荒的战争还未胜利。

财富分配的不均，今天增长中的获益者极易变成未来的保守派。

The financiers who suggest that Africa could soon rival Asia have let their imaginations run riot. Whereas one is the workshop of the world, the other almost exclusively exports what grows in fields or is dug out from below them.

非洲还是不能与亚洲相提并论滴。

亚洲是世界工厂，非洲除了出口田野里的，要不就是从地底下挖的东西。

About a third of Africa’s GDP growth comes from commodities. This will not last. Today’s prices are near record highs and commodity markets have a habit of collapsing. Furthermore, recent gains in agricultural commodities may be undermined by climate change. Even now, savannahs are drying out, water tables are dropping and rains either failing or becoming more irregular. One in five Africans will be directly affected by 2020. Even as their continent prospers, many of them will continue to depend on agriculture and there is little they can do about the threats to the world’s environment.

非洲主要的是农产品。农产品价格已经高企，说不定市场崩溃。

还有全球气候变得糟糕是个威胁。

Another reason to push ahead is that Africa’s hard-won victories are vulnerable to relapses. Kenya is a model for other countries in east Africa but the campaign for elections on March 4th has been marred by violence (see article). New scourges—like Islamist extremism in the Sahara—could yet sow instability.

另一个原因是非洲现在的成就很容易再度陷落，伊斯兰极端主义是稳定的一个威胁。

And Africa must make the most of two transitions it is now going through.

The move from the countryside to cities offers the chance of a one-off boost to productivity both on the farm and in the slums. If African states bungle this, they will create a dangerous unemployed urban class.

 城市化与就业的陷阱

At the same time, though Africa’s population is still growing rapidly—it will double to 2 billion by 2050—families there are becoming smaller. This promises a “demographic dividend”, as the number of workers relative to children and the elderly increases. The continent must make use of this bulge of labour, and the savings it produces, for development. If they squander it, Africans will grow old before they grow rich.

 非洲的人口红利，搞不好未老先衰。

Break down your borders

Africa’s citizens are already striving to become more productive. Farmers have started using hand-held gadgets to gain access to weather reports. Slums too are teeming with technology. The internet is changing the way the continent does business. In Kenya a third of GDP flows through a mobile money-transfer system set up by a private telecoms company.

 农村现代化

因特网的应用

But Africa’s entrepreneurs are often stymied by the state.

The bottom third countries in the World Bank’s ease-of-business ranking are almost all in Africa. Their people could easily have better lives; abundant capital and technology offer big opportunities. The infrastructure is improving—only 5% of the 15,800 miles travelled for our special report was on unpaved roads—but the power grid is a disaster.

 交通已经改善了许多，不过电力很糟糕。

On the whole, government officials should focus less on building things than getting out of the way. Useless regulations have created bottlenecks. East Africa’s main port in Mombasa is gummed up and land borders across the continent hold back lorries for days.

 港口，交通运输仍然是瓶颈。

Restrictions on employing migrants and on land ownership prevent businesses from expanding. Bureaucrats and customs officers inflate the cost of getting anything done. Shipping a car from China to Tanzania costs $4,000, but getting it from there to nearby Uganda can cost another $5,000.

 交通运输，边境交流还是不畅。

If aspiring Africa wants a new dream, it should be creating a common market from the Med to the Cape. That would be a boon to trade, enterprise and manufacturing:

 

it would also get rid of much of the petty corruption and save lives. A recent World Bank report pointed out that Africa could produce enough food to feed itself;

反腐败，解决粮食自给问题。

alas, too few subsistence farmers get a chance to sell their produce (and usually get less than 20% of the market price). Why not rekindle pan-Africanism by opening borders drawn in London and Paris?

 开放流通，

Africa needs a reborn liberation movement—except this time the aim is to free Africans from civil servants rather than colonial masters.

非洲需要再次解放，不过这次不是从殖民者手中，而是从自给的公仆手中。

本文仅供学习交流使用，不代表orientday的观点。原文版权归作者所有http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21572773-pride-africas-achievements-should-be-coupled-determination-make-even-faster，转载请联系原作者 。