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How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World's Last Developmental Frontier
“[O]ne of the most original and important books on Africa in years.”—Financial Times
“Challenges outdated narratives and makes a compelling case for the continent's economic potential.”—Bill Gates
From the acclaimed author of How Asia Works, an essential exploration of the engines of economic growth across Africa
The culmination of twenty years spent studying Asian economics, Joe Studwell’s celebrated How Asia Works revealed the key policies behind the meteoric growth of the “Asian tigers.” The question he kept hearing from those inspired by his clear-eyed understanding of global what about Africa? He was finally convinced to investigate further when the inquiries began coming from Africans themselves. A decade of research, travel and on-the-ground reporting began.
Studwell expected that Africa’s challenging geography and its crippling legacies of colonialism would necessitate a unique developmental recipe. Yet to his astonishment, the African countries that succeeded did so by embracing the very same strategies their Asian counterparts had—strategies that are far different from those foisted on Africa by the international community. He explores these winning policies via four countries that have seen exceptional economic growth (Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia and Rwanda) and that demonstrate both the promise and the particular challenge of the African context. Highlighting the achievements of local leaders, Studwell argues that prosperity is well within reach and that the rapidly rising population—seen as alarming by so many—will be foundational to Africa’s flourishing. How Africa Works is essential, optimistic reading for anyone looking to understand the next chapter of global development.
“Challenges outdated narratives and makes a compelling case for the continent's economic potential.”—Bill Gates
From the acclaimed author of How Asia Works, an essential exploration of the engines of economic growth across Africa
The culmination of twenty years spent studying Asian economics, Joe Studwell’s celebrated How Asia Works revealed the key policies behind the meteoric growth of the “Asian tigers.” The question he kept hearing from those inspired by his clear-eyed understanding of global what about Africa? He was finally convinced to investigate further when the inquiries began coming from Africans themselves. A decade of research, travel and on-the-ground reporting began.
Studwell expected that Africa’s challenging geography and its crippling legacies of colonialism would necessitate a unique developmental recipe. Yet to his astonishment, the African countries that succeeded did so by embracing the very same strategies their Asian counterparts had—strategies that are far different from those foisted on Africa by the international community. He explores these winning policies via four countries that have seen exceptional economic growth (Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia and Rwanda) and that demonstrate both the promise and the particular challenge of the African context. Highlighting the achievements of local leaders, Studwell argues that prosperity is well within reach and that the rapidly rising population—seen as alarming by so many—will be foundational to Africa’s flourishing. How Africa Works is essential, optimistic reading for anyone looking to understand the next chapter of global development.
448 pages, Hardcover
Published February 17, 2026
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When Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works came out in 2013, it was a book deeply out of consensus. In an age of randomized control trials and micro-interventions, it resurrected macro policies—land redistribution, industrial policy—that had virtually disappeared from mainstream development economics. Moreover, it returned East Asia, the only developing region in the world to successfully make the postwar climb out of poverty, back to the center of debate.
Thirteen years on, Studwell probably deserves some kind of triumphal march. Industrial policy is back in a big way. Through How Asia Works’s influence on Noah Smith and a host of bloggers, a generation of young tech-adjacent males were primed to rant about semiconductor subsidies at parties.
I am no exception. Reading How Asia Works was a formative intellectual experience for me—a jolt out of the mathematical slumber of PhD coursework. I have a complex relationship with the text (more on this in a moment), but I still recommend it effusively to anyone who wants to learn about East Asia.
Now, thirteen years later, Joe Studwell is back. How Africa Works aims to do for Africa what he achieved for Asia—becoming the natural first stop for readers who want to learn about the economics of the continent.
A Dismal Inheritance
The first part of How Africa Works addresses the perennial question: why is Africa poor?
Historically, low population density, induced by pests like the tse-tse fly, discouraged the formation of large urban centers. The slave trade—first Arab, then Western—further depopulated the continent, breaking down social bonds. When Europeans arrived in force in the 19th century, they did colonialism on the cheap, with few policemen and even fewer schools. Unlike (say) the Japanese in Korea or Taiwan, the colonial state rarely penetrated much farther than the capital or key ports, leaving governance in the vast hinterland to invented or upjumped chiefs.
Decolonization left a dismal inheritance. In spite of superficial similarities in GDP with East or South Asia, Africa had far more problems on its plate. Levels of education were far too low to sustain an effective civil service, let alone communities of engineers or innovators. Incoherent states encased in inappropriate borders meant Africa’s founding fathers had to stitch nations together from unrelated ethnic groups.
Studwell’s diagnosis of Africa’s problems is steadfastly conventional, leaning heavily on the academic consensus established by Jeffrey Herbst, Robert Bates, Nicolas van de Walle, Leonard Wantchekon, among others. This is no dig; Studwell is an elegant synthesizer. I have some quibbles around the margins—the underrating of precolonial Africa reflects some lingering Western state-centric bias—but as a diagnosis for Africa’s poverty this is a far richer, textured, and more accurate account than the memelike “extractive institutions”.
Four Success Stories
Having set the scene, Studwell turns to four successful case studies: Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia, and Rwanda. This itself is a refreshing approach to economic analysis of Africa, which so often wants to dwell on failure. Unlike Taiwan or South Korea, none of these countries is an unqualified developmental miracle, but their relative success provides clues to how an African economic transformation might take place.
Botswana
Botswana is Studwell’s poster child for a successful democratic developmental coalition. (For this reason, it featured heavily in Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail as an example of “inclusive institutions”.)
Under the sound leadership of Seretse Khama, local chiefs were carefully co-opted at independence and the Botswana Democratic Party built up into a genuine national force. Khama also created a capable civil service, initially staffed by remaining Europeans, but gradually Africanized with sterling Batswana talent. This meant that when diamonds were discovered just around independence, the windfall was carefully managed, avoiding the worst effects of Dutch Disease. These mining revenues helped raise Botswana to upper middle-income status, making it the fourth-richest country in continental Africa.
Botswana’s chief failing, in Studwell’s view, was adhering too much to responsible policy orthodoxy—i.e., not enough industrial policy. There was no vision for large-scale industrialization, no coherent plan to create large numbers of factory jobs. Moreover, the political dominance of large cattle owners (Botswana was a society of pastoralists rather than farmers) meant that redistribution was never in the cards. The result is a relatively rich society, but one that is highly unequal.
Mauritius
Mauritius, which is often not thought of as an African country, is perhaps the most unusual choice. An uninhabited island before Dutch colonization in the 17th century, its ethnic makeup of Indians and Creoles resembles the Caribbean more than continental Africa. Moreover, Mauritius became independent in 1968 at an income level that most contemporary Africans would envy (see chart above).
Nonetheless, Mauritius’s developmental record is impressive. Originally a sugar colony, a tax on sugar receipts was used to funnel landowners’ capital from agriculture to manufacturing. In the subsequent manufacturing drive, powered by the exports of apparel and textiles, GDP rose 6% a year. With egalitarian, broad-based growth, poverty was virtually eradicated.
However, Mauritius was unable to make the leap from garments to higher-value manufacturing, and the sector’s share of GDP has since halved from over 20 percent to just 11 percent by 2020. Alongside Seychelles, it is one of only two African countries ranked “very high” on the UN’s Human Development Index.
Rwanda
Ethiopia and Rwanda, as recent developmental darlings and conscious emulators of the East Asian example, are perhaps the least surprising inclusions in Studwell’s list.
Under President Paul Kagame, Rwanda has explicitly modeled itself after Singapore (including Lee Kuan Yew’s authoritarian tendencies). At first blush, this struck me as absurd: Singapore is an island state on the crossroads of the world’s richest sea lanes; Rwanda is a landlocked country in poor central Africa.
Studwell’s account convinced me there is an economic logic to this strategy. The high cost of road transport means that importing goods into Central Africa is prohibitively expensive. Rwanda does not necessarily need to compete with the world; by delivering on infrastructure projects and maintaining rare political stability, it can attract investment as a kind of entrepot to Africa’s Great Lakes. Under this formula (with perhaps some slight fudging of the numbers), Rwanda has maintained impressive 7% growth for the past decade.
The big question surrounding Rwanda is if the growth coalition can hold together. Nowhere else in Africa is the tragic legacy of ethnic division more apparent; the present Kagame regime took power by overthrowing the perpetrators of the infamous 1994 genocide. Rwanda’s military involvement in the Eastern Congo, which represents both a source of raw materials and a lucrative market of 30 million, adds a further dark cast to its developmental success.
Ethiopia
It is Ethiopia that comes the closest to achieving all parts of Studwell’s formula. As a country of 135 million people, it has the scale to set a major example to the world and to take a serious bite out of Africa’s poverty all on its own.
Meles Zenawi, prime minister from 1995 to 2012, was an avid student of East Asia. (His thesis outline is available online; for any economist with a wavering faith in the power of ideas, read the bibliography.) Under his leadership, the Ethiopian state invested heavily in agricultural extension and irrigation, improving the yields of smallholder farmers. It began (with Chinese support) building industrial parks to support an export manufacturing base. Most ambitious of all, it began work on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, one of the largest hydropower projects in the world, to find a permanent solution to Ethiopia’s energy woes.
No student of How Asia Works could have done better. Had How Africa Works been published before November 2020, it’s easy to see how a celebration of Ethiopia might have occupied most of the book.
But the outbreak of civil war derailed Ethiopia’s progress, and demonstrated the continuing risk of ethnic conflict to the prospects of economic growth.
Read the rest of my review on my blog, Global-Developments.org
Thirteen years on, Studwell probably deserves some kind of triumphal march. Industrial policy is back in a big way. Through How Asia Works’s influence on Noah Smith and a host of bloggers, a generation of young tech-adjacent males were primed to rant about semiconductor subsidies at parties.
I am no exception. Reading How Asia Works was a formative intellectual experience for me—a jolt out of the mathematical slumber of PhD coursework. I have a complex relationship with the text (more on this in a moment), but I still recommend it effusively to anyone who wants to learn about East Asia.
Now, thirteen years later, Joe Studwell is back. How Africa Works aims to do for Africa what he achieved for Asia—becoming the natural first stop for readers who want to learn about the economics of the continent.
A Dismal Inheritance
The first part of How Africa Works addresses the perennial question: why is Africa poor?
Historically, low population density, induced by pests like the tse-tse fly, discouraged the formation of large urban centers. The slave trade—first Arab, then Western—further depopulated the continent, breaking down social bonds. When Europeans arrived in force in the 19th century, they did colonialism on the cheap, with few policemen and even fewer schools. Unlike (say) the Japanese in Korea or Taiwan, the colonial state rarely penetrated much farther than the capital or key ports, leaving governance in the vast hinterland to invented or upjumped chiefs.
Decolonization left a dismal inheritance. In spite of superficial similarities in GDP with East or South Asia, Africa had far more problems on its plate. Levels of education were far too low to sustain an effective civil service, let alone communities of engineers or innovators. Incoherent states encased in inappropriate borders meant Africa’s founding fathers had to stitch nations together from unrelated ethnic groups.
Studwell’s diagnosis of Africa’s problems is steadfastly conventional, leaning heavily on the academic consensus established by Jeffrey Herbst, Robert Bates, Nicolas van de Walle, Leonard Wantchekon, among others. This is no dig; Studwell is an elegant synthesizer. I have some quibbles around the margins—the underrating of precolonial Africa reflects some lingering Western state-centric bias—but as a diagnosis for Africa’s poverty this is a far richer, textured, and more accurate account than the memelike “extractive institutions”.
Four Success Stories
Having set the scene, Studwell turns to four successful case studies: Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia, and Rwanda. This itself is a refreshing approach to economic analysis of Africa, which so often wants to dwell on failure. Unlike Taiwan or South Korea, none of these countries is an unqualified developmental miracle, but their relative success provides clues to how an African economic transformation might take place.
Botswana
Botswana is Studwell’s poster child for a successful democratic developmental coalition. (For this reason, it featured heavily in Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail as an example of “inclusive institutions”.)
Under the sound leadership of Seretse Khama, local chiefs were carefully co-opted at independence and the Botswana Democratic Party built up into a genuine national force. Khama also created a capable civil service, initially staffed by remaining Europeans, but gradually Africanized with sterling Batswana talent. This meant that when diamonds were discovered just around independence, the windfall was carefully managed, avoiding the worst effects of Dutch Disease. These mining revenues helped raise Botswana to upper middle-income status, making it the fourth-richest country in continental Africa.
Botswana’s chief failing, in Studwell’s view, was adhering too much to responsible policy orthodoxy—i.e., not enough industrial policy. There was no vision for large-scale industrialization, no coherent plan to create large numbers of factory jobs. Moreover, the political dominance of large cattle owners (Botswana was a society of pastoralists rather than farmers) meant that redistribution was never in the cards. The result is a relatively rich society, but one that is highly unequal.
Mauritius
Mauritius, which is often not thought of as an African country, is perhaps the most unusual choice. An uninhabited island before Dutch colonization in the 17th century, its ethnic makeup of Indians and Creoles resembles the Caribbean more than continental Africa. Moreover, Mauritius became independent in 1968 at an income level that most contemporary Africans would envy (see chart above).
Nonetheless, Mauritius’s developmental record is impressive. Originally a sugar colony, a tax on sugar receipts was used to funnel landowners’ capital from agriculture to manufacturing. In the subsequent manufacturing drive, powered by the exports of apparel and textiles, GDP rose 6% a year. With egalitarian, broad-based growth, poverty was virtually eradicated.
However, Mauritius was unable to make the leap from garments to higher-value manufacturing, and the sector’s share of GDP has since halved from over 20 percent to just 11 percent by 2020. Alongside Seychelles, it is one of only two African countries ranked “very high” on the UN’s Human Development Index.
Rwanda
Ethiopia and Rwanda, as recent developmental darlings and conscious emulators of the East Asian example, are perhaps the least surprising inclusions in Studwell’s list.
Under President Paul Kagame, Rwanda has explicitly modeled itself after Singapore (including Lee Kuan Yew’s authoritarian tendencies). At first blush, this struck me as absurd: Singapore is an island state on the crossroads of the world’s richest sea lanes; Rwanda is a landlocked country in poor central Africa.
Studwell’s account convinced me there is an economic logic to this strategy. The high cost of road transport means that importing goods into Central Africa is prohibitively expensive. Rwanda does not necessarily need to compete with the world; by delivering on infrastructure projects and maintaining rare political stability, it can attract investment as a kind of entrepot to Africa’s Great Lakes. Under this formula (with perhaps some slight fudging of the numbers), Rwanda has maintained impressive 7% growth for the past decade.
The big question surrounding Rwanda is if the growth coalition can hold together. Nowhere else in Africa is the tragic legacy of ethnic division more apparent; the present Kagame regime took power by overthrowing the perpetrators of the infamous 1994 genocide. Rwanda’s military involvement in the Eastern Congo, which represents both a source of raw materials and a lucrative market of 30 million, adds a further dark cast to its developmental success.
Ethiopia
It is Ethiopia that comes the closest to achieving all parts of Studwell’s formula. As a country of 135 million people, it has the scale to set a major example to the world and to take a serious bite out of Africa’s poverty all on its own.
Meles Zenawi, prime minister from 1995 to 2012, was an avid student of East Asia. (His thesis outline is available online; for any economist with a wavering faith in the power of ideas, read the bibliography.) Under his leadership, the Ethiopian state invested heavily in agricultural extension and irrigation, improving the yields of smallholder farmers. It began (with Chinese support) building industrial parks to support an export manufacturing base. Most ambitious of all, it began work on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, one of the largest hydropower projects in the world, to find a permanent solution to Ethiopia’s energy woes.
No student of How Asia Works could have done better. Had How Africa Works been published before November 2020, it’s easy to see how a celebration of Ethiopia might have occupied most of the book.
But the outbreak of civil war derailed Ethiopia’s progress, and demonstrated the continuing risk of ethnic conflict to the prospects of economic growth.
Read the rest of my review on my blog, Global-Developments.org
July 26, 2026
My actual rating is a 3.5, but if I had to choose between rounding up to a 4 or going down to a 3 I'd lean more towards a 3. Joe Studwell, the author of the excellent "How Asia Works" took on an impossible task of writing a book on the "world's last developmental frontier" and despite his best attempt, the enormity of the task was too much for him.
Studwell recounts the reasons for Africa's underdevelopment - sparse population, disease, colonisation. The kind of causes one would be familiar with from the work of Rodney, Sachs, French, Acemoglu et al. He then proceeds to prescribe his preferred policy mix - land reforms to support smallholder agriculture; creation of local export-driven manufacturing through the state directing savings into investment in that sector; and capital controls to prevent investment in speculative sectors.
In order to prove that Africa can indeed work, he uses Botswana, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Mauritius as four very different countries which have all met some level of developmental success. He believes each of these states would do better if they adopt his policy prescriptions.
Despite his commendable attempt, the work is simply too big an undertaking and his research quality suffers as a result. While "How Asia Works" focused on East Asian states mostly in the same post-WWII, cold war era with similar state designs (majority ethnicity, shared language, and a nation largely existing before colonialism). For a continent as diverse as Africa, his work would've been better served by focusing on regions which might have some similarities in the way they evolved.
If this is your first Studwell book, I would recommend you read "How Asia Works". I believe you will find some contrast between that work and this one. I am still quite impressed that Studwell took on the challenge and produced this work. But perhaps, he should not have been challenged in the first place.
Studwell recounts the reasons for Africa's underdevelopment - sparse population, disease, colonisation. The kind of causes one would be familiar with from the work of Rodney, Sachs, French, Acemoglu et al. He then proceeds to prescribe his preferred policy mix - land reforms to support smallholder agriculture; creation of local export-driven manufacturing through the state directing savings into investment in that sector; and capital controls to prevent investment in speculative sectors.
In order to prove that Africa can indeed work, he uses Botswana, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Mauritius as four very different countries which have all met some level of developmental success. He believes each of these states would do better if they adopt his policy prescriptions.
Despite his commendable attempt, the work is simply too big an undertaking and his research quality suffers as a result. While "How Asia Works" focused on East Asian states mostly in the same post-WWII, cold war era with similar state designs (majority ethnicity, shared language, and a nation largely existing before colonialism). For a continent as diverse as Africa, his work would've been better served by focusing on regions which might have some similarities in the way they evolved.
If this is your first Studwell book, I would recommend you read "How Asia Works". I believe you will find some contrast between that work and this one. I am still quite impressed that Studwell took on the challenge and produced this work. But perhaps, he should not have been challenged in the first place.
October 5, 2025
Some time ago, I read “Africa is not a country” and, although this book is based on different premises and, above all, explains in deep only 4 African countries using different indicators, I find that both books have been fundamental in allowing me to understand a little better a continent so vast that it encompasses all the possibilities of the world.
Ho letto qualche tempo fa "Africa is not a country" e per quanto questo libro si basi su premesse diverse e soprattutto spieghi solo alcuni paesi africani (4 per la precisione) usando indicatori diversi, trovo che entrambi siano stati fondamentali per permettermi di capire un po' meglio un continente talmente grande, che al suo interno racchiude tutte le possibilitá del mondo.
I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.
Ho letto qualche tempo fa "Africa is not a country" e per quanto questo libro si basi su premesse diverse e soprattutto spieghi solo alcuni paesi africani (4 per la precisione) usando indicatori diversi, trovo che entrambi siano stati fondamentali per permettermi di capire un po' meglio un continente talmente grande, che al suo interno racchiude tutte le possibilitá del mondo.
I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.
June 15, 2026
Studwell argues that Africa’s development failures are largely the result of policy and institutional weaknesses rather than geography, colonial history, or a lack of aid. Drawing heavily on the East Asian experience, he emphasises three drivers of development: raising agricultural productivity, promoting export-oriented manufacturing, and maintaining a state capable of disciplining both public and private actors.
The book’s strength is its focus on the practical mechanics of economic transformation rather than abstract development theory. Studwell is particularly effective in highlighting the importance of agriculture, incentives, and state capacity. However, he arguably overstates the extent to which the East Asian model can be replicated in Africa, giving insufficient weight to differences in political institutions, demographics, state capability, and historical context.
Overall, How Africa Works is a clear, provocative, and highly readable contribution to the development literature. Even where one disagrees with its conclusions, it raises important questions about why some countries achieve sustained structural transformation while others remain trapped in low-productivity equilibria.
The book’s strength is its focus on the practical mechanics of economic transformation rather than abstract development theory. Studwell is particularly effective in highlighting the importance of agriculture, incentives, and state capacity. However, he arguably overstates the extent to which the East Asian model can be replicated in Africa, giving insufficient weight to differences in political institutions, demographics, state capability, and historical context.
Overall, How Africa Works is a clear, provocative, and highly readable contribution to the development literature. Even where one disagrees with its conclusions, it raises important questions about why some countries achieve sustained structural transformation while others remain trapped in low-productivity equilibria.
May 6, 2026
A very ambitious book that seeks to explain how Africa can develop further. I think that its ambition is also its downfall to an extent. Many of the 'lessons' for development in Africa are drawn from four case studies: Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia, and Rwanda. I am sceptical that these few case studies are sufficiently representative to be able to offer development lessons for the whole continent. Particularly, three of these countries are extremely small, relatively speaking. Meanwhile, the largest and most influential economies of Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa are mostly neglected.
The book also has a strong sectoral focus, prioritizing discussions of agriculture and manufacturing to the near complete neglect of the services sector, which is only increasing in importance. The author identified uniquely low levels of education as one of the binding constraints to development in Africa. However, this theme is totally neglected after the first few chapters. The agricultural and manufacturing sectors, which he identifies as the main source of development, doesn't place such a strong premium on education as some other sectors. In addition, there is no discussion of how increasing education levels will push wage levels up, reducing Africa's cost-competitiveness compared with other developing regions.
Nevertheless, I think the book makes a valuable contribution to the discourse on African development. I found his arguments on the benefits of population density for developing markets quite convincing and refreshing. I agree with his overall point that Africa will continue its development and play a larger role in the world, though the book gives an incomplete picture of how the continent will get there.
The book also has a strong sectoral focus, prioritizing discussions of agriculture and manufacturing to the near complete neglect of the services sector, which is only increasing in importance. The author identified uniquely low levels of education as one of the binding constraints to development in Africa. However, this theme is totally neglected after the first few chapters. The agricultural and manufacturing sectors, which he identifies as the main source of development, doesn't place such a strong premium on education as some other sectors. In addition, there is no discussion of how increasing education levels will push wage levels up, reducing Africa's cost-competitiveness compared with other developing regions.
Nevertheless, I think the book makes a valuable contribution to the discourse on African development. I found his arguments on the benefits of population density for developing markets quite convincing and refreshing. I agree with his overall point that Africa will continue its development and play a larger role in the world, though the book gives an incomplete picture of how the continent will get there.
August 21, 2026
Like some of my favorite nonfiction books, i learned about this book from the Conversations with Tyler podcast. And this is the first book I’ve read after listening to that podcast that I have not rated 4 stars or higher. I understand what the author was doing here, comparing the development model of Asia with the development of Africa, looking at success where it can be found, and seeing why some of the states in Africa are not developing at the rates of others. I also appreciate him trying to stick to the economic facts. But I needed more cultural/religious information. Even a tiny bit of information about the culture/religion would’ve been great, but I had to go research that myself in between readings. I know he was focusing on success or wise-success stories but I also found it odd that Nigeria received so little focus considering it is projected to be the third most populous country in just a few decades. I love it when a book keeps me wanting more, but not to the point where constant, purposeful omissions require me to do digging for information that the book should have provided
March 12, 2026
A little dry and unfocused, but good overview. I found his more journalistic/anthropological sections towards the end most compelling, where he's discussing smallholder agriculture. Wish the whole book could have been like this, but the history was obviously necessary. Could it have been woven in better? Probably.
A great jumping off point for further reading.
A great jumping off point for further reading.
August 2, 2026
By 2060 Africa will be a $15 trillion economy or roughly the size of China today. East Africa, the region least endowed with oil and minerals, leads the pack, and "the world will speak not of Africa as troubled continent, but of parts of it as troubled and parts of it as promising". What Lagos is today doing for music globally, Nairobi can do for EVs.
This book is a must-read for anyone interested in Africa. It balances depth with readability, embeds economic development and future prospects in their historical context, and is surprisingly captivating (especially if you work in Africa, as I do) for an economics book. Studwell's demographic argument is a refreshing addition to an endless debate.
In this successor to How Asia Works, Studwell follows his standard recipe: first develop agriculture, use the surpluses earned to kick-start manufacturing, and build a financial system that drives this in a way that rewards competitiveness (expressed as exports) rather than leakage to cronies or to less job-creating sectors such as real estate (speculation).
Despite the fact that some economies are behind where they were decades ago (such as Madagascar and Zimbabwe), Studwell's view is that Africa is not doing so poorly once you look at the fundamentals behind the key economic drivers. Chief among these are the legacy of "low budget colonialism" that Africa inherited and its low population density. The second argument in particular is original and food for thought. Studwell then zooms in on four countries with a remarkable track record of 6-10% GDP growth that is long enough to multiply their economies many fold in decades.
Africa was dealt a terrible hand in its colonial legacy, which Studwell dubs "low budget colonialism". Compared to East Asia, it had a long way to cover on basic development. Literacy stood at an appalling 16% in 1960 (against 38% in Asia) and has since reached 70%, heading towards 96%. Infrastructure shows the same pattern: Uganda had only 840 km of paved roads in 1962, up to 6,300 km by 2025, with 90% of the road network still unpaved.
Critically, governance remains the weak link in Africa, with the colonialists leaving a dismal track record when it comes to building democracy. The move away from aristocracy towards a professional, meritocratic system is a gradual one, with mixed results. With near-random post-colonial borders, Africa also has serious linguistic and ethnic fragmentation to overcome - a process that took Europe more than a thousand years and was a bloody affair. Measured against income levels, Africa's democratic processes are well ahead of what Europe, Asia or other parts of the world managed at the same stage, with a first array of peaceful transitions of power. The challenge is that democracy does not always deliver the decades of consistent policy that economic development requires.
Studwell most original argument focusses on population density. Africa only just reached the density Asia had when its economies started to take off in the 1960s. Back then, Africa had 10 people per square kilometre, the same level as Europe in 1500. Limited healthcare and a landscape prone to disease (malaria, tsetse, etc.) kept life expectancy low and slavery did not help. In 1900 Sub-Saharan Africa had only two cities with more than 20,000 people (Lagos and Dar es Salaam), against Singapore's 250,000 and Shanghai's 500,000 at the same time.
Today Africa's density is 53 people per square kilometre, just above Asia's level in 1960 (the level at which Asia's economies started to take off). This is where the argument gets interesting: many core economic processes depend on density. Markets that demand goods, and therefore the (price) incentive to produce them. Labour for agricultural fields and factories. The case to invest in roads and utilities. A tax base meaningful enough to fund healthcare and education. And even nation building and government accountability, since people could avoid resolving conflict, or never grow into an ever larger polis, by simply migrating to a different piece of land. As a standalone argument this line of reasoning may not hold, but it is an original way of looking at Africa's development.
Botswana
Botswana showed impressive unity, driven by the Seretse Khama figure and myth, and executed its development plans competently through a meritocratic bureaucracy. It negotiated impressive deals with the diamond companies (notably De Beers) and used the mineral proceeds to build infrastructure, offer government services, and fill a rainy day fund: the Pula Fund, literally the rain fund, set up in 1994, which sadly proved too small to offer protection when diamond prices came down by 30% in recent years. Botswana grew into an impressive middle income country, from $350 per capita in 1976 to over $8,000 by 2022, where it has stagnated somewhat as the country lacked a vision for growth beyond minerals. Agricultural policy focused on the beef cattle elite, and beyond some diamond processing no manufacturing was developed. That keeps the country sensitive to diamond price swings, with growth that is not broad-based and unemployment above 25%.
Mauritius
Mauritius is Africa's biggest success story. In just two generations, this island of one million people reached high status on the UN's Human Development Index — the only country in Sub-Saharan Africa to achieve this — and increased its GDP per capita fifty-fold. Like Botswana, Mauritius had a strong, unified and inclusive political coalition behind its development plan. It may not have been tribal, but its population of French, Chinese, Hindu-Indian and African/Malagasy groups had its fair share of ethnic tension, especially between the French and the Hindu community, with African groups joining the French side.
Unlike Botswana, Mauritius had a strong vision to drive its development, following Studwell's doctrine almost to the letter. It built success on its sugar industry, where the Mauritius Sugar Syndicate secured duty-free exports to Europe and a direct deal with Germany's Südzucker. Once the windfall sugar profits came in, the government gradually increased the tax on sugar exports from 5% to 24%, driving the sugar barons to invest and diversify into other businesses, principally labour-intensive knitwear manufacturing in export zones (which were not bound to specific geographies — they just had to export) with tax incentives. It successfully attracted French manufacturers, given duty-free access to the European market, and Hong Kong textile giants. At its peak, textiles accounted for a third of employment, and at some point Mauritius was the third biggest exporter of woollen knitwear in the world. This large industrial base further diversified into tourism and finance. The growth record is absolutely stellar: GDP per capita from $250 (!) at independence to $12,000 today, making Mauritius Africa's richest country. Impressively, its Gini coefficient improved from 0.5 at independence to 0.33 today (0 being perfect equality).
Ethiopia
Ethiopia - or the one that got away - should have been the pinnacle of Studwell's textbook progress and "came closest to replicating the East Asian playbook" at scale with a population of 140 million (Africa's second largest after Nigeria). Economic growth geared up in the 1990s after bereaucrats and leadership carefully studied Taiwan and South Korea.
The first growth phase was agriculture and Studwell speaks particularly fondly of Meles Zenawi, who drove development with a 'farmer first' model: agriculture built on smallholder labour over big capital, subsidised agricultural inputs that doubled input use, and a big network of development agents and agronomists (16 per 10,000 farmers vs. 13 in China and 4 in Tanzania). The agricultural sector grew by 7% for a decade and more and cereal production tripled between 1991 and 2014. I have seen myself how Ethiopia built a large, professional barley sector.
The second phase started around the 2000s when Ethiopian bureaucrats pushed for industrialisation, with the investment in roads, rail and power generation that industry requires. It developed labour-intensive manufacturing in specialised, energy-intensive industrial parks, with strict export discipline. Manufacturing grew tenfold into a $4bn industry, driven by Chinese and Indian investment. Lastly, it is a Studwell classic in how it used financial repression: strict capital controls, a cheaply valued currency, and massive state banks directed to channel capital towards manufacturing.
Ethiopia delivered stellar growth of 10% per year between 2004 and 2019 and was on track to pull off an economic miracle until its political unity - which was fragile due to its a unique ethnic federation - backfired in the worst possible manner in a messy war that seems to be protracted. In response, Ethiopia returned in 2019 to a one-party state, a proven model to drive early development, meant to represent all ethnicities. It is too early to see whether if and when this can deliver results. Next to this lack of political unity, Ethiopia's other main weakness is the too small role it has given the private sector, with an over-reliance on mega state projects and no support to develop its nascent private sector.
Rwanda
Last, Studwell covers Rwanda, the "Singapore of Central Africa", as it aims to emulate aspects of Singapore (including its strict public order) in its Vision 2020 plan: good governance and efficient government services, where it stands out in Africa; investment in education; infrastructure development, and the roads are certainly top notch; and private sector growth driven by a highly competent development board modelled after the one in Singapore, to which I can personally testify. These aspects are all impressive, and the government is unusually capable and business friendly, unique in East Africa. Rwanda has shown high growth over the past three decades. Breaking with the Studwell textbook, Rwanda focuses on services — transport, trade, tourism, finance — rather than manufacturing, and it remains to be seen how this "leapfrogging" of manufacturing plays out.
Conclusion
In general, Studwell is positive about agriculture, which over the past decades has shown the highest growth rates in the world, at 4.5%, as unused land goes into production. Africa sits on the world's largest unused land bank, and this growth will continue. It is quite profitable and is driving economic development in villages, where shops, bars, motorcycles and TVs are starting to pop up, and it drives a first stage of industrialisation through agri-processing, which accounts for 50% of manufacturing in certain African countries. Yields are only going up slowly: government programmes are lacklustre and tend to benefit the elite, financing is lacking, and land reform has not happened in any meaningful way. Studwell is a believer in the smallholder model, as smallholders tend to be more productive than larger farmers — machines are often less good than labour.
Manufacturing is the easiest sector to make competitive under free trade, given that machinery is widely available. The binding constraint is politics: too weak to build competitive industry, which means growth is led by the few countries that have this together. Low population density makes labour relatively expensive, and the non-labour costs of logistics and utilities are not competitive either, as infrastructure is not at par, again partly a density problem. This is getting better: Africa's population is growing while East Asia matures and wages there go up. By 2036, Africa will have a larger workforce than China and India combined. China already started to outsource basic manufacturing - footwear, garments, plastics - with 85 million jobs moving in the 2010s, mainly to South East Asia but also to Africa: first to Ethiopia and to the massive steel plant in Zimbabwe, in line with a trend towards local processing enforced by some governments.
Manufacturing can be an excellent source of economic and employment growth and in many countries this is happening through immigrant business communities and Chinese investors, despite rather than because of governments, which are not as serious about executing the decades-long plans to develop manufacturing the way Asian Tigers governments did.
The most common point of criticism to Studwell is his emphasis on manufacturing. Could Africa skip manufacturing and grow only with agriculture and services? That is the model of India, Studwell argues and its a fraction (±20%) of China's economy mainly because the manufacturing that creates a lot of jobs and real added value at scale is missing. If we are honest about services in Africa today, many are low value such as hawking, Uber drivers, househelps and the like.
Rwanda, Botswana, Mauritius and Ethiopia demonstrate that rapid development is possible in Africa under the right policies. Population density is now at a point where it supports the development of African economies and lives. But governments matter, and only if political elites prioritise growth over rent extraction and start to execute seriously will Africa convert its big and growing population into an asset rather than a liability.
This book is a must-read for anyone interested in Africa. It balances depth with readability, embeds economic development and future prospects in their historical context, and is surprisingly captivating (especially if you work in Africa, as I do) for an economics book. Studwell's demographic argument is a refreshing addition to an endless debate.
In this successor to How Asia Works, Studwell follows his standard recipe: first develop agriculture, use the surpluses earned to kick-start manufacturing, and build a financial system that drives this in a way that rewards competitiveness (expressed as exports) rather than leakage to cronies or to less job-creating sectors such as real estate (speculation).
Despite the fact that some economies are behind where they were decades ago (such as Madagascar and Zimbabwe), Studwell's view is that Africa is not doing so poorly once you look at the fundamentals behind the key economic drivers. Chief among these are the legacy of "low budget colonialism" that Africa inherited and its low population density. The second argument in particular is original and food for thought. Studwell then zooms in on four countries with a remarkable track record of 6-10% GDP growth that is long enough to multiply their economies many fold in decades.
Africa was dealt a terrible hand in its colonial legacy, which Studwell dubs "low budget colonialism". Compared to East Asia, it had a long way to cover on basic development. Literacy stood at an appalling 16% in 1960 (against 38% in Asia) and has since reached 70%, heading towards 96%. Infrastructure shows the same pattern: Uganda had only 840 km of paved roads in 1962, up to 6,300 km by 2025, with 90% of the road network still unpaved.
Critically, governance remains the weak link in Africa, with the colonialists leaving a dismal track record when it comes to building democracy. The move away from aristocracy towards a professional, meritocratic system is a gradual one, with mixed results. With near-random post-colonial borders, Africa also has serious linguistic and ethnic fragmentation to overcome - a process that took Europe more than a thousand years and was a bloody affair. Measured against income levels, Africa's democratic processes are well ahead of what Europe, Asia or other parts of the world managed at the same stage, with a first array of peaceful transitions of power. The challenge is that democracy does not always deliver the decades of consistent policy that economic development requires.
Studwell most original argument focusses on population density. Africa only just reached the density Asia had when its economies started to take off in the 1960s. Back then, Africa had 10 people per square kilometre, the same level as Europe in 1500. Limited healthcare and a landscape prone to disease (malaria, tsetse, etc.) kept life expectancy low and slavery did not help. In 1900 Sub-Saharan Africa had only two cities with more than 20,000 people (Lagos and Dar es Salaam), against Singapore's 250,000 and Shanghai's 500,000 at the same time.
Today Africa's density is 53 people per square kilometre, just above Asia's level in 1960 (the level at which Asia's economies started to take off). This is where the argument gets interesting: many core economic processes depend on density. Markets that demand goods, and therefore the (price) incentive to produce them. Labour for agricultural fields and factories. The case to invest in roads and utilities. A tax base meaningful enough to fund healthcare and education. And even nation building and government accountability, since people could avoid resolving conflict, or never grow into an ever larger polis, by simply migrating to a different piece of land. As a standalone argument this line of reasoning may not hold, but it is an original way of looking at Africa's development.
Botswana
Botswana showed impressive unity, driven by the Seretse Khama figure and myth, and executed its development plans competently through a meritocratic bureaucracy. It negotiated impressive deals with the diamond companies (notably De Beers) and used the mineral proceeds to build infrastructure, offer government services, and fill a rainy day fund: the Pula Fund, literally the rain fund, set up in 1994, which sadly proved too small to offer protection when diamond prices came down by 30% in recent years. Botswana grew into an impressive middle income country, from $350 per capita in 1976 to over $8,000 by 2022, where it has stagnated somewhat as the country lacked a vision for growth beyond minerals. Agricultural policy focused on the beef cattle elite, and beyond some diamond processing no manufacturing was developed. That keeps the country sensitive to diamond price swings, with growth that is not broad-based and unemployment above 25%.
Mauritius
Mauritius is Africa's biggest success story. In just two generations, this island of one million people reached high status on the UN's Human Development Index — the only country in Sub-Saharan Africa to achieve this — and increased its GDP per capita fifty-fold. Like Botswana, Mauritius had a strong, unified and inclusive political coalition behind its development plan. It may not have been tribal, but its population of French, Chinese, Hindu-Indian and African/Malagasy groups had its fair share of ethnic tension, especially between the French and the Hindu community, with African groups joining the French side.
Unlike Botswana, Mauritius had a strong vision to drive its development, following Studwell's doctrine almost to the letter. It built success on its sugar industry, where the Mauritius Sugar Syndicate secured duty-free exports to Europe and a direct deal with Germany's Südzucker. Once the windfall sugar profits came in, the government gradually increased the tax on sugar exports from 5% to 24%, driving the sugar barons to invest and diversify into other businesses, principally labour-intensive knitwear manufacturing in export zones (which were not bound to specific geographies — they just had to export) with tax incentives. It successfully attracted French manufacturers, given duty-free access to the European market, and Hong Kong textile giants. At its peak, textiles accounted for a third of employment, and at some point Mauritius was the third biggest exporter of woollen knitwear in the world. This large industrial base further diversified into tourism and finance. The growth record is absolutely stellar: GDP per capita from $250 (!) at independence to $12,000 today, making Mauritius Africa's richest country. Impressively, its Gini coefficient improved from 0.5 at independence to 0.33 today (0 being perfect equality).
Ethiopia
Ethiopia - or the one that got away - should have been the pinnacle of Studwell's textbook progress and "came closest to replicating the East Asian playbook" at scale with a population of 140 million (Africa's second largest after Nigeria). Economic growth geared up in the 1990s after bereaucrats and leadership carefully studied Taiwan and South Korea.
The first growth phase was agriculture and Studwell speaks particularly fondly of Meles Zenawi, who drove development with a 'farmer first' model: agriculture built on smallholder labour over big capital, subsidised agricultural inputs that doubled input use, and a big network of development agents and agronomists (16 per 10,000 farmers vs. 13 in China and 4 in Tanzania). The agricultural sector grew by 7% for a decade and more and cereal production tripled between 1991 and 2014. I have seen myself how Ethiopia built a large, professional barley sector.
The second phase started around the 2000s when Ethiopian bureaucrats pushed for industrialisation, with the investment in roads, rail and power generation that industry requires. It developed labour-intensive manufacturing in specialised, energy-intensive industrial parks, with strict export discipline. Manufacturing grew tenfold into a $4bn industry, driven by Chinese and Indian investment. Lastly, it is a Studwell classic in how it used financial repression: strict capital controls, a cheaply valued currency, and massive state banks directed to channel capital towards manufacturing.
Ethiopia delivered stellar growth of 10% per year between 2004 and 2019 and was on track to pull off an economic miracle until its political unity - which was fragile due to its a unique ethnic federation - backfired in the worst possible manner in a messy war that seems to be protracted. In response, Ethiopia returned in 2019 to a one-party state, a proven model to drive early development, meant to represent all ethnicities. It is too early to see whether if and when this can deliver results. Next to this lack of political unity, Ethiopia's other main weakness is the too small role it has given the private sector, with an over-reliance on mega state projects and no support to develop its nascent private sector.
Rwanda
Last, Studwell covers Rwanda, the "Singapore of Central Africa", as it aims to emulate aspects of Singapore (including its strict public order) in its Vision 2020 plan: good governance and efficient government services, where it stands out in Africa; investment in education; infrastructure development, and the roads are certainly top notch; and private sector growth driven by a highly competent development board modelled after the one in Singapore, to which I can personally testify. These aspects are all impressive, and the government is unusually capable and business friendly, unique in East Africa. Rwanda has shown high growth over the past three decades. Breaking with the Studwell textbook, Rwanda focuses on services — transport, trade, tourism, finance — rather than manufacturing, and it remains to be seen how this "leapfrogging" of manufacturing plays out.
Conclusion
In general, Studwell is positive about agriculture, which over the past decades has shown the highest growth rates in the world, at 4.5%, as unused land goes into production. Africa sits on the world's largest unused land bank, and this growth will continue. It is quite profitable and is driving economic development in villages, where shops, bars, motorcycles and TVs are starting to pop up, and it drives a first stage of industrialisation through agri-processing, which accounts for 50% of manufacturing in certain African countries. Yields are only going up slowly: government programmes are lacklustre and tend to benefit the elite, financing is lacking, and land reform has not happened in any meaningful way. Studwell is a believer in the smallholder model, as smallholders tend to be more productive than larger farmers — machines are often less good than labour.
Manufacturing is the easiest sector to make competitive under free trade, given that machinery is widely available. The binding constraint is politics: too weak to build competitive industry, which means growth is led by the few countries that have this together. Low population density makes labour relatively expensive, and the non-labour costs of logistics and utilities are not competitive either, as infrastructure is not at par, again partly a density problem. This is getting better: Africa's population is growing while East Asia matures and wages there go up. By 2036, Africa will have a larger workforce than China and India combined. China already started to outsource basic manufacturing - footwear, garments, plastics - with 85 million jobs moving in the 2010s, mainly to South East Asia but also to Africa: first to Ethiopia and to the massive steel plant in Zimbabwe, in line with a trend towards local processing enforced by some governments.
Manufacturing can be an excellent source of economic and employment growth and in many countries this is happening through immigrant business communities and Chinese investors, despite rather than because of governments, which are not as serious about executing the decades-long plans to develop manufacturing the way Asian Tigers governments did.
The most common point of criticism to Studwell is his emphasis on manufacturing. Could Africa skip manufacturing and grow only with agriculture and services? That is the model of India, Studwell argues and its a fraction (±20%) of China's economy mainly because the manufacturing that creates a lot of jobs and real added value at scale is missing. If we are honest about services in Africa today, many are low value such as hawking, Uber drivers, househelps and the like.
Rwanda, Botswana, Mauritius and Ethiopia demonstrate that rapid development is possible in Africa under the right policies. Population density is now at a point where it supports the development of African economies and lives. But governments matter, and only if political elites prioritise growth over rent extraction and start to execute seriously will Africa convert its big and growing population into an asset rather than a liability.
February 28, 2026
a bit undercooked
February 6, 2026
How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World’s Last Developmental Frontier is the sequel to Joe Studwell’s influential examination of East Asian economic development that offers an ambitious intellectual framework for Africa’s future growth. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in a dozen African countries, Studwell argues that the continent’s persistent poverty can be addressed through the adoption of a coherent and largely uniform set of policies that proved successful in East Asia. These include the subdivision of large landholdings into small-scale household farms, active support for domestic manufacturing, and state-led, comprehensive strategies for development and industrialization. By highlighting several African success stories, Studwell challenges claims of African exceptionalism and contends that the core maxims of economic development that succeeded elsewhere can also bear fruit on the continent.
Studwell clearly and persuasively attributes Africa’s current predicament to a constellation of historical and structural factors, including ethnic fragmentation, chronically low population density, political immaturity, land inequality, and deficits in education. Prior to the twentieth century, many African societies were organized into relatively loose political groupings, and the often-violent process of state formation—experienced in Europe during the medieval and early modern periods—was interrupted by colonial rule. Colonial powers, exploitative in both design and practice, failed either to distribute settler land equitably to subsistence farmers, thereby fostering social stability, or to nurture domestic manufacturing. This “unhelpful economic inheritance,” as Studwell terms it, deprived postcolonial states of egalitarian land ownership, local entrepreneurship, and the political cohesion necessary to pursue shared development strategies. Combined with the lowest average levels of educational attainment in the world, postcolonial Africa emerged as an economic basket case.
Despite these deep-rooted constraints, Studwell insists that Africa’s endowments need not determine its destiny. Through a series of carefully chosen case studies, he examines countries that have implemented effective development strategies and achieved growth rates comparable to, or exceeding, those of East Asia. These include Botswana, a resource-dependent state that forged a broad political consensus around inclusive national development; Mauritius, a small island nation governed by a pluralistic coalition of urban professionals committed to export-oriented industrialization, support for small landholders, and robust welfare and education systems; Ethiopia, where concentrated state intervention has promoted infrastructure investment, vocational agricultural training, the commercialization of smallholder farming, and industrial policy modeled on Asian precedents; and Rwanda, which Studwell portrays as a case of strong governance and state capacity inspired by Singapore. Across these examples, Studwell identifies common themes: agricultural policies that empower smallholders, deliberate efforts to cultivate domestic manufacturing, and political leadership committed to public service, often through cross-ethnic coalitions organized around a developmental agenda.
While Studwell’s concise and compelling development blueprint is grounded in notable successes, it is not without limitations. His argument tends to understate the heterogeneity of historical trajectories, demographic realities, and geographic constraints that complicate direct comparisons between Africa and Asia. Small-plot farming flourished in Asia in part because of high population density, which enabled labor-intensive cultivation, alongside favorable soil quality and rainfall patterns. Much of Africa, by contrast, faces lower population density, more variable rainfall, weaker transport networks, and limited irrigation, all of which constrain the productivity of smallholder agriculture. African manufacturing likewise confronts formidable obstacles, including competition from inexpensive Asian imports, external tariff barriers in Europe and North America, poor infrastructure, and the disadvantages faced by landlocked countries. Moreover, several of Studwell’s success stories are shaped by distinctive colonial legacies. Mauritius, his most celebrated example, was historically uninhabited, lacked the ethnic fragmentation characteristic of many mainland African states, and inherited relatively effective governance institutions from British rule. Rwanda’s impressive gains in governance and service delivery are offset by its small scale and heavy dependence on foreign aid, while Botswana remains highly reliant on a narrow and unique set of commodity exports. The combined legacies of what Studwell calls “low-budget colonialism,” enduring political and ethnic fragmentation, aid dynamics, and geography all complicate his proposed algorithm for success.
Taken as a whole, How Africa Works presents a lucid case for the broad applicability of developmental policies capable of advancing Africa’s economic frontier. Matching the analytical rigor of his earlier work on Asia, Studwell contends that Africa’s multidimensional challenges can be mitigated through political and economic practices that empower small landholders and local entrepreneurs in pursuit of broad-based growth. Central to this vision is a strong, capable state—one able to spearhead development through inclusive political coalitions that remain firmly oriented toward a long-term developmental agenda.
Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an advance copy of this work.
Studwell clearly and persuasively attributes Africa’s current predicament to a constellation of historical and structural factors, including ethnic fragmentation, chronically low population density, political immaturity, land inequality, and deficits in education. Prior to the twentieth century, many African societies were organized into relatively loose political groupings, and the often-violent process of state formation—experienced in Europe during the medieval and early modern periods—was interrupted by colonial rule. Colonial powers, exploitative in both design and practice, failed either to distribute settler land equitably to subsistence farmers, thereby fostering social stability, or to nurture domestic manufacturing. This “unhelpful economic inheritance,” as Studwell terms it, deprived postcolonial states of egalitarian land ownership, local entrepreneurship, and the political cohesion necessary to pursue shared development strategies. Combined with the lowest average levels of educational attainment in the world, postcolonial Africa emerged as an economic basket case.
Despite these deep-rooted constraints, Studwell insists that Africa’s endowments need not determine its destiny. Through a series of carefully chosen case studies, he examines countries that have implemented effective development strategies and achieved growth rates comparable to, or exceeding, those of East Asia. These include Botswana, a resource-dependent state that forged a broad political consensus around inclusive national development; Mauritius, a small island nation governed by a pluralistic coalition of urban professionals committed to export-oriented industrialization, support for small landholders, and robust welfare and education systems; Ethiopia, where concentrated state intervention has promoted infrastructure investment, vocational agricultural training, the commercialization of smallholder farming, and industrial policy modeled on Asian precedents; and Rwanda, which Studwell portrays as a case of strong governance and state capacity inspired by Singapore. Across these examples, Studwell identifies common themes: agricultural policies that empower smallholders, deliberate efforts to cultivate domestic manufacturing, and political leadership committed to public service, often through cross-ethnic coalitions organized around a developmental agenda.
While Studwell’s concise and compelling development blueprint is grounded in notable successes, it is not without limitations. His argument tends to understate the heterogeneity of historical trajectories, demographic realities, and geographic constraints that complicate direct comparisons between Africa and Asia. Small-plot farming flourished in Asia in part because of high population density, which enabled labor-intensive cultivation, alongside favorable soil quality and rainfall patterns. Much of Africa, by contrast, faces lower population density, more variable rainfall, weaker transport networks, and limited irrigation, all of which constrain the productivity of smallholder agriculture. African manufacturing likewise confronts formidable obstacles, including competition from inexpensive Asian imports, external tariff barriers in Europe and North America, poor infrastructure, and the disadvantages faced by landlocked countries. Moreover, several of Studwell’s success stories are shaped by distinctive colonial legacies. Mauritius, his most celebrated example, was historically uninhabited, lacked the ethnic fragmentation characteristic of many mainland African states, and inherited relatively effective governance institutions from British rule. Rwanda’s impressive gains in governance and service delivery are offset by its small scale and heavy dependence on foreign aid, while Botswana remains highly reliant on a narrow and unique set of commodity exports. The combined legacies of what Studwell calls “low-budget colonialism,” enduring political and ethnic fragmentation, aid dynamics, and geography all complicate his proposed algorithm for success.
Taken as a whole, How Africa Works presents a lucid case for the broad applicability of developmental policies capable of advancing Africa’s economic frontier. Matching the analytical rigor of his earlier work on Asia, Studwell contends that Africa’s multidimensional challenges can be mitigated through political and economic practices that empower small landholders and local entrepreneurs in pursuit of broad-based growth. Central to this vision is a strong, capable state—one able to spearhead development through inclusive political coalitions that remain firmly oriented toward a long-term developmental agenda.
Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an advance copy of this work.
September 28, 2026
Could there be a better book for a young white guy who has spent a lot of time in East Asia and is now about to work in development finance in Africa to familiarise himself with the continent’s development challenges than one written by an old white guy who spent a lot of time in East Asia? Probably not.
On a serious note though, this is one of the better non-fiction, popular science books one can find on developmental economics. Quite well structured, clear narrative, repetitions where they makes sense and underline key points.
Would have only cut a lot of the examples in the “displaced and divided chapter”, half of that is enough to get the gist. But I guess I always prefer shorter, down to the point books. Someone else might have enjoyed these excessive illustrations of the point that often ethnic divides, sometimes even artificially constructed in colonial times, hindered developmental coalitions such as those in East Asia (more monoethnic) or multiethnic Singapore, especially right after independence. I normally don’t give 4 stars to popular science book, but this deserves it. Or I’m just in a good mood, who knows.
On a serious note though, this is one of the better non-fiction, popular science books one can find on developmental economics. Quite well structured, clear narrative, repetitions where they makes sense and underline key points.
Would have only cut a lot of the examples in the “displaced and divided chapter”, half of that is enough to get the gist. But I guess I always prefer shorter, down to the point books. Someone else might have enjoyed these excessive illustrations of the point that often ethnic divides, sometimes even artificially constructed in colonial times, hindered developmental coalitions such as those in East Asia (more monoethnic) or multiethnic Singapore, especially right after independence. I normally don’t give 4 stars to popular science book, but this deserves it. Or I’m just in a good mood, who knows.
October 4, 2026
Zware kost, maar de moeite waard. Ik heb economie in Afrika nooit begrepen en geloof dat ik er nu iets meer van snap.
July 8, 2026
I enjoyed this. Bit of a slow start - definitely feels less focused and persuasive than Studwell’s previous “How Asia Works,” but it grew on me as I realized he was trading persuasion for precision. Africa is complicated, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions, but there are principles - support for smallholder farmers, development coalitions - that can help. I leave this read with better understanding and more hope about the developmental future of the world’s poorest continent.
September 17, 2026
my main problem with the book is he continually espouses how great things could be if industrial policy was done correctly, smallholder agriculture was focused on, etc, but then in the next sentence explains how much it was a disaster the last time these things were attempted and how the military misallocates resources, and so on. and then there are just two or three paragraphs at the end about how to improve state capacity and mostly brushes it off, along with democracy which seems like a nice plus but not really important ultimately (fair, but again, begs the question of what the institutional solution is). ultimately it is on one hand a very optimistic book in the sense that so much is possible and i agree that the unlocked demand from urbanization, changes in relative wages, etc is powerful, but very pessimistic in the sense that it is short on real ideas or solutions for how to upgrade governance in a way that will make the big ideas studwell has in mind possible to actualize.
but this is just my initial reaction; perhaps will have more thoughts after book club ...
but this is just my initial reaction; perhaps will have more thoughts after book club ...
May 12, 2026
Several years ago I read and enjoyed How Asia Works, Joe Studwell’s previous book. It’s deeply informed but easy to read, and offers a plausible account of how Asia got rich.
Apparently Bill Gates enjoyed Studwell’s book too, and asked him whether he might take a similar approach to Africa. The obvious difference, of course, is that Africa still hasn’t gotten rich. There is no African equivalent yet to the economic miracles of South Korea or China.
In Studwell’s view - a view I largely agree with - this is mostly a matter of timing. Africa is not fundamentally different from Asia or Europe; it is simply at an earlier stage of economic development. In fact, much of the continent today resembles Asia roughly fifty years ago, just before the beginning of the fastest sustained economic climb in human history.
Studwell argues that there are three key elements for a country seeking to move from poverty to lower-middle-income status.
The first is increasing the productivity of smallholder agriculture. This remains the dominant form of production in most developing countries, and an even more dominant source of employment. Because smallholder agriculture is relatively unproductive, it may account for only 20 percent of GDP or exports while employing 60–70 percent of the labor force.
Smallholder agriculture is less productive than modern industrial farming because it lacks capital-intensive irrigation, fertilizer, machinery, and the technical knowledge needed to use them effectively. Some countries have tried to leap directly from small-scale premodern farming to industrial agriculture through collectivization, but the historical record here is poor. Large-scale industrial agriculture in advanced economies depends on enormous capital inputs, which poorer agrarian societies generally lack.
A better approach, Studwell argues, is to preserve small-scale farming while ensuring that farmers have secure legal title to their land and access to financing, equipment, and technical assistance. Such programs can often operate at relatively low cost to the state because farmers themselves provide much of the investment capital. The state, meanwhile, can focus on infrastructure such as roads and ports.
State agricultural marketing monopolies are often, in effect, a mechanism for extracting taxes from the poorest people in the country. Farmers are typically required to sell their output at fixed prices below world-market rates, with the state capturing the difference.
For some governments this may seem like a practical necessity, since they have few alternative sources of capital for industrial development. But these monopolies can also become sources of corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency, their failures masked by the large profits that monopsony buying power can generate.
The second key ingredient to growth is export-oriented manufacturing. Most countries begin industrialization with import-substitution industries - often protected by tariffs and focused on basic goods such as soap, processed foods, or beverages. These industries can provide an important foundation for later development, but subsidies and trade protections can also shelter inefficient producers.
Export-oriented firms, by contrast, must compete globally on both price and quality. Once they prove capable of doing so, they can often scale rapidly and profitably. Inefficient tariff-protected industries, meanwhile, frequently collapse once their protections are removed.
The final factor Studwell identifies in Asia’s rise is disciplined state finance. Successful states pursued policies that encouraged savings and investment, discouraged capital flight, and attracted foreign capital while gradually reducing long-term dependence on it.
Much of Studwell’s survey of Africa consists of detailed case studies of individual countries and the extent to which they have followed, or failed to follow, this developmental path.
I was particularly impressed by his description of Ethiopia, whose leadership, he argues, brought unusual academic rigor to economic development. Policy decisions were supported by meticulously researched position papers that ministers were expected to write and defend themselves. Unfortunately, the country also suffered from recurring conflict with Eritrea, as well as poor vendor selection - at one point choosing a North Korean firm for a major engineering project that was never completed.
Studwell also disputes the oft-repeated claim that Africa is uniquely resource-rich. The continent’s resource density is not especially high; Africa is simply very large, so the aggregate quantity of resources is enormous. Moreover, resource extraction can function in economies with weak manufacturing and service sectors, meaning it often represents a disproportionate share of economic activity in underdeveloped countries.
The best-known resource success story - perhaps aside from South Africa - is Botswana, which experienced one of the fastest growth rates in the world for decades after independence and is now a middle-income country. Much of this success stemmed from the country’s diamond industry, which proved extraordinarily lucrative. Botswana was also able to pressure its partner De Beers to develop cutting and polishing facilities locally, allowing the country to move further up the value chain. In recent decades, however, development has tilted more toward consumption than production - shopping malls rather than factories - which may prove problematic once the diamond wealth declines.
Leo Tolstoy’s dictum that “all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” may be reversible when it comes to economies. Dysfunctional economies tend to resemble one another, while every successful growth story is distinctive. The cases in this book illustrate that point well. As Studwell notes, there are recurring patterns in successful development, but there is no universal formula.
Apparently Bill Gates enjoyed Studwell’s book too, and asked him whether he might take a similar approach to Africa. The obvious difference, of course, is that Africa still hasn’t gotten rich. There is no African equivalent yet to the economic miracles of South Korea or China.
In Studwell’s view - a view I largely agree with - this is mostly a matter of timing. Africa is not fundamentally different from Asia or Europe; it is simply at an earlier stage of economic development. In fact, much of the continent today resembles Asia roughly fifty years ago, just before the beginning of the fastest sustained economic climb in human history.
Studwell argues that there are three key elements for a country seeking to move from poverty to lower-middle-income status.
The first is increasing the productivity of smallholder agriculture. This remains the dominant form of production in most developing countries, and an even more dominant source of employment. Because smallholder agriculture is relatively unproductive, it may account for only 20 percent of GDP or exports while employing 60–70 percent of the labor force.
Smallholder agriculture is less productive than modern industrial farming because it lacks capital-intensive irrigation, fertilizer, machinery, and the technical knowledge needed to use them effectively. Some countries have tried to leap directly from small-scale premodern farming to industrial agriculture through collectivization, but the historical record here is poor. Large-scale industrial agriculture in advanced economies depends on enormous capital inputs, which poorer agrarian societies generally lack.
A better approach, Studwell argues, is to preserve small-scale farming while ensuring that farmers have secure legal title to their land and access to financing, equipment, and technical assistance. Such programs can often operate at relatively low cost to the state because farmers themselves provide much of the investment capital. The state, meanwhile, can focus on infrastructure such as roads and ports.
State agricultural marketing monopolies are often, in effect, a mechanism for extracting taxes from the poorest people in the country. Farmers are typically required to sell their output at fixed prices below world-market rates, with the state capturing the difference.
For some governments this may seem like a practical necessity, since they have few alternative sources of capital for industrial development. But these monopolies can also become sources of corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency, their failures masked by the large profits that monopsony buying power can generate.
The second key ingredient to growth is export-oriented manufacturing. Most countries begin industrialization with import-substitution industries - often protected by tariffs and focused on basic goods such as soap, processed foods, or beverages. These industries can provide an important foundation for later development, but subsidies and trade protections can also shelter inefficient producers.
Export-oriented firms, by contrast, must compete globally on both price and quality. Once they prove capable of doing so, they can often scale rapidly and profitably. Inefficient tariff-protected industries, meanwhile, frequently collapse once their protections are removed.
The final factor Studwell identifies in Asia’s rise is disciplined state finance. Successful states pursued policies that encouraged savings and investment, discouraged capital flight, and attracted foreign capital while gradually reducing long-term dependence on it.
Much of Studwell’s survey of Africa consists of detailed case studies of individual countries and the extent to which they have followed, or failed to follow, this developmental path.
I was particularly impressed by his description of Ethiopia, whose leadership, he argues, brought unusual academic rigor to economic development. Policy decisions were supported by meticulously researched position papers that ministers were expected to write and defend themselves. Unfortunately, the country also suffered from recurring conflict with Eritrea, as well as poor vendor selection - at one point choosing a North Korean firm for a major engineering project that was never completed.
Studwell also disputes the oft-repeated claim that Africa is uniquely resource-rich. The continent’s resource density is not especially high; Africa is simply very large, so the aggregate quantity of resources is enormous. Moreover, resource extraction can function in economies with weak manufacturing and service sectors, meaning it often represents a disproportionate share of economic activity in underdeveloped countries.
The best-known resource success story - perhaps aside from South Africa - is Botswana, which experienced one of the fastest growth rates in the world for decades after independence and is now a middle-income country. Much of this success stemmed from the country’s diamond industry, which proved extraordinarily lucrative. Botswana was also able to pressure its partner De Beers to develop cutting and polishing facilities locally, allowing the country to move further up the value chain. In recent decades, however, development has tilted more toward consumption than production - shopping malls rather than factories - which may prove problematic once the diamond wealth declines.
Leo Tolstoy’s dictum that “all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” may be reversible when it comes to economies. Dysfunctional economies tend to resemble one another, while every successful growth story is distinctive. The cases in this book illustrate that point well. As Studwell notes, there are recurring patterns in successful development, but there is no universal formula.
May 21, 2026
How Africa Works is, in many ways, an inevitably difficult follow-up to How Asia Works. The earlier work possessed something rare in economic writing: sharp contrasts, tightly structured case studies, and dramatic developmental divergence across countries that were often geographically close yet institutionally worlds apart. Asia, in that sense, offered the author almost laboratory-like conditions for comparative analysis. And, the author was on the familiar territories of his deep expertise.
Africa, by contrast, is a continent whose economic and political history is shaped by forces that are broader, deeper, and in many cases tragically more uniform. That difference matters, and it shapes this book profoundly.
Some of the book’s central arguments — low population density, the devastating legacy of slavery, colonial extraction structures, and the continent’s difficult institutional “exit point” from colonialism — are compelling and often persuasive. Yet they are also, by their very nature, more generalized explanations. They do not lend themselves to the same degree of granular analytical contrast that made the Asian work feel so relentlessly precise and intellectually surgical. As a result, while the research is robust, the book does not possess the policy autopsy that gave his earlier work its towering analytical stature.
The chosen success stories of Botswana, Mauritius, Rwanda, and Ethiopia are undeniably important and impressive by African standards. Sadly, they do not quite provide the same scale of transformative rise witnessed in North Asia. In each, there is a pervasive gloom of not only what came before but a march towards a stage with more negatives than positives. One senses throughout that the author is working with a far more constrained historical canvas.
And yet, despite those differences, this remains an outstanding book.
For readers who are not deeply familiar with African economic history, this is an immensely rewarding and often eye-opening work. The book is rich with facts, historical detail, political context, and carefully constructed arguments. More importantly, it repeatedly reminds the reader that Africa’s developmental history cannot simply be interpreted through the same frameworks used for Europe or Asia. The continent’s economic trajectory was shaped by structural conditions that were genuinely unusual in global history. The author compellingly argues that the traditional, heavily cited bogeymen of underdevelopment—endemic corruption and ethnic strife—are actually secondary to deeper structural deficits. He meticulously details the other crippling historical burdens: the legacy of slavery, the exceptionally brutal and chaotic exit points from the colonial era, and, crucially, a historically low population density exacerbated by a uniquely virulent disease burden.
The author is remarkably hopeful about the continent's current trajectory precisely because this core demographic deficit is reversing. With population density rising, literacy expanding rapidly, and urbanization creating new economic gravity, the prerequisites for sustained growth are finally falling into place.
Despite this optimism, a structural comparison of the author's two books reveals a sobering subtext. In his Asian analysis, the narrative moved swiftly from foundational land reforms to rigorous, state-directed industrial policies and careful financial liberalization. In stark contrast, How Africa Works positions its detailed discussions on land policy much closer to the end of the narrative, while the critical subsequent steps of industrialization strategies and financialization are barely mentioned in passing.
In that sense, the book unintentionally leaves the reader with a sobering conclusion: if the lessons of Asia are indeed valid, then Africa’s path forward may still prove considerably more difficult and uneven than the book’s hopeful tone occasionally suggests.
Still, that complexity is precisely what makes this such a worthwhile read. The book does not offer simplistic optimism, nor does it collapse into fashionable pessimism. Instead, it grapples honestly with a continent whose history resists easy comparison and whose future remains one of the most important economic questions of our time.
Africa, by contrast, is a continent whose economic and political history is shaped by forces that are broader, deeper, and in many cases tragically more uniform. That difference matters, and it shapes this book profoundly.
Some of the book’s central arguments — low population density, the devastating legacy of slavery, colonial extraction structures, and the continent’s difficult institutional “exit point” from colonialism — are compelling and often persuasive. Yet they are also, by their very nature, more generalized explanations. They do not lend themselves to the same degree of granular analytical contrast that made the Asian work feel so relentlessly precise and intellectually surgical. As a result, while the research is robust, the book does not possess the policy autopsy that gave his earlier work its towering analytical stature.
The chosen success stories of Botswana, Mauritius, Rwanda, and Ethiopia are undeniably important and impressive by African standards. Sadly, they do not quite provide the same scale of transformative rise witnessed in North Asia. In each, there is a pervasive gloom of not only what came before but a march towards a stage with more negatives than positives. One senses throughout that the author is working with a far more constrained historical canvas.
And yet, despite those differences, this remains an outstanding book.
For readers who are not deeply familiar with African economic history, this is an immensely rewarding and often eye-opening work. The book is rich with facts, historical detail, political context, and carefully constructed arguments. More importantly, it repeatedly reminds the reader that Africa’s developmental history cannot simply be interpreted through the same frameworks used for Europe or Asia. The continent’s economic trajectory was shaped by structural conditions that were genuinely unusual in global history. The author compellingly argues that the traditional, heavily cited bogeymen of underdevelopment—endemic corruption and ethnic strife—are actually secondary to deeper structural deficits. He meticulously details the other crippling historical burdens: the legacy of slavery, the exceptionally brutal and chaotic exit points from the colonial era, and, crucially, a historically low population density exacerbated by a uniquely virulent disease burden.
The author is remarkably hopeful about the continent's current trajectory precisely because this core demographic deficit is reversing. With population density rising, literacy expanding rapidly, and urbanization creating new economic gravity, the prerequisites for sustained growth are finally falling into place.
Despite this optimism, a structural comparison of the author's two books reveals a sobering subtext. In his Asian analysis, the narrative moved swiftly from foundational land reforms to rigorous, state-directed industrial policies and careful financial liberalization. In stark contrast, How Africa Works positions its detailed discussions on land policy much closer to the end of the narrative, while the critical subsequent steps of industrialization strategies and financialization are barely mentioned in passing.
In that sense, the book unintentionally leaves the reader with a sobering conclusion: if the lessons of Asia are indeed valid, then Africa’s path forward may still prove considerably more difficult and uneven than the book’s hopeful tone occasionally suggests.
Still, that complexity is precisely what makes this such a worthwhile read. The book does not offer simplistic optimism, nor does it collapse into fashionable pessimism. Instead, it grapples honestly with a continent whose history resists easy comparison and whose future remains one of the most important economic questions of our time.
June 14, 2026
Studwell applies his usual recipe to the African context and the takeaway is surprisingly positive. To rehash, the 1-2-3 development plan that Studwell established in his most popular book, How Asia Works, is as follows:
1. Land reform to drive agricultural productivity. Provide support to farmers and drive yield.
2. As agriculture becomes more productive and the labour pool expands, pivot to an industrial policy focus that supports firms with "export discipline" to drive global competitiveness.
3. Implement financial controls and provide incentives to manufacturers through low-interest loans. Provide easy access to financing for export-oriented firms.
In the African context, the first step is where most countries are at, with the primary challenge that is unique to the content being the high degree of ethnic fragmentation. The effect is that there is a "culture of government..obsessed by the struggle for power", largely to sustain patron-client relationships.
The book focuses on four countries in Sub-Saharan Africa which have experienced some degree of success in fulfilling their developmental objectives: Mauritius, Botswana, Rwanda, and Ethiopia. Studwell uses these case studies as an anchor point to frame policy recommendations for the wider continent. My main gripe with the examples is one that couldn't be avoided really: that barring Mauritius none of the countries listed is really far on the road to development. In addition, the most successful of the 4 (Mauritius and Botswana) both have populations less than 3 million people.
Gripes aside, I found the treatment of each country to be fairly detailed and well-researched. In some cases, I even had a good laugh or two especially with the "eccentric" figure of Mauritius' former Deputy Prime Minister, Gaëtan Duval who "even allowed his home to be used as a location for a 1978 German soft pornographic film called Melody in Love" in his promotion of Mauritius as a tourism destination.
Why Hopeful?
The primary reason for my optimism leaving this book stems from the systemic refutation of commonly cited critiques of Africa, especially with respect to the capacity of governments to build inclusive states and for there to be long-lasting sustained progress and growth.
Studwell begins by laying the unique context and challenges of African development: low population density, "low-budget" colonialism, highly heterogeneous states, particularly nasty endemic diseases and pestilence, and the list goes on. One of the most notable statistics cited at the beginning of the book was:
African colonial governments systemically and uniquely underinvested in building state capacity and educational institutions.
However, the progress has been remarkable: by 1995 alone, female literacy reached 48 per cent.
Joe Studwell also points out that with increasing urbanization and higher population densities, there is finally a sufficiently large enough consumption and labor pool to spur domestic industry and agriculture. Further, with the comparatively low wages on the continent foreign direct investment in manufacturing becomes more and more attractive.
It's pointed out in the book that development is multi-dimensional with no "magic bullet". The author is also a pragmatist in recognizing that not all African states will develop at the same pace. However, there will be breakouts like in the case of Mauritius which provide an example for other states to follow. While the 21st century might not be the "African Century" as proclaimed by over-exuberant journalists, the African continent is a far ways from the "Growth Tragedy" as lamented by World Bank economists in 1997.
1. Land reform to drive agricultural productivity. Provide support to farmers and drive yield.
2. As agriculture becomes more productive and the labour pool expands, pivot to an industrial policy focus that supports firms with "export discipline" to drive global competitiveness.
3. Implement financial controls and provide incentives to manufacturers through low-interest loans. Provide easy access to financing for export-oriented firms.
In the African context, the first step is where most countries are at, with the primary challenge that is unique to the content being the high degree of ethnic fragmentation. The effect is that there is a "culture of government..obsessed by the struggle for power", largely to sustain patron-client relationships.
The book focuses on four countries in Sub-Saharan Africa which have experienced some degree of success in fulfilling their developmental objectives: Mauritius, Botswana, Rwanda, and Ethiopia. Studwell uses these case studies as an anchor point to frame policy recommendations for the wider continent. My main gripe with the examples is one that couldn't be avoided really: that barring Mauritius none of the countries listed is really far on the road to development. In addition, the most successful of the 4 (Mauritius and Botswana) both have populations less than 3 million people.
Gripes aside, I found the treatment of each country to be fairly detailed and well-researched. In some cases, I even had a good laugh or two especially with the "eccentric" figure of Mauritius' former Deputy Prime Minister, Gaëtan Duval who "even allowed his home to be used as a location for a 1978 German soft pornographic film called Melody in Love" in his promotion of Mauritius as a tourism destination.
Why Hopeful?
The primary reason for my optimism leaving this book stems from the systemic refutation of commonly cited critiques of Africa, especially with respect to the capacity of governments to build inclusive states and for there to be long-lasting sustained progress and growth.
Studwell begins by laying the unique context and challenges of African development: low population density, "low-budget" colonialism, highly heterogeneous states, particularly nasty endemic diseases and pestilence, and the list goes on. One of the most notable statistics cited at the beginning of the book was:
Formal educational attainment in Africa was the lowest on the planet...In 1960...There were perhaps 8,000 secondary school graduates per year in a population of 200 million
African colonial governments systemically and uniquely underinvested in building state capacity and educational institutions.
However, the progress has been remarkable: by 1995 alone, female literacy reached 48 per cent.
Joe Studwell also points out that with increasing urbanization and higher population densities, there is finally a sufficiently large enough consumption and labor pool to spur domestic industry and agriculture. Further, with the comparatively low wages on the continent foreign direct investment in manufacturing becomes more and more attractive.
It's pointed out in the book that development is multi-dimensional with no "magic bullet". The author is also a pragmatist in recognizing that not all African states will develop at the same pace. However, there will be breakouts like in the case of Mauritius which provide an example for other states to follow. While the 21st century might not be the "African Century" as proclaimed by over-exuberant journalists, the African continent is a far ways from the "Growth Tragedy" as lamented by World Bank economists in 1997.
March 22, 2026
I’ve read a lot of books about Africa and economic development and this is the only one I’ve ever found that is about both economic development and Africa, so if this is a topic you’re interested in, you’ll be interested in this book.
Studwell is well known for his books about economic development in Asia and his thesis that the 3 universal pillars to grow are 1) create agricultural surpluses through improving smallholder productivity 2) get into manufacturing and move up the value chain and 3) financial repression to funnel high domestic savings in to domestic manufacturing domestic champions to help them grow. The thesis of this book is the same general principles, adapted to local circumstances, will work in Africa. Studwell doesn’t believe that there’s anything biological or geographical that will keep Africa permanently down. However, from a historical perspective, he points out that low population density due to historical (slavery) and geographic (diseases) reasons has prevented Africa from having the necessary ingredients for success until about the year 2000.
The book itself isn’t that prescriptive, pointing the reader towards his other books to learn more about the details of the 3 pillars, but instead is about applying that framework to African countries to explain successes and failures. Studwell is at his best when comparing and contrasting (How Asia Works is set up as a comparison between East and Southeast Asia) and that’s still true in this book as well. It’s fascinating to learn how Mauritius in the middle of nowhere was able to run a better export-oriented industrialization playbook and get substantially richer than Morocco which has a literal land border with the European Union. There is another interesting comparison between Botswana’s management of its mineral resources vs. pretty much every other country in Africa which have squandered away their resources, but at the same time the limits of how far Botswana could develop without a competitive manufacturing or agricultural sector.
Another positive of the book is that Studwell clearly loves agriculture and dives deep into farming and farming policy which I’ve never seen another book do. It was great to learn the history of African farming from small area, low productivity to bigger area, low productivity, to finally higher productivity under certain, political circumstances. It also explained a long running question I had of what’s driving African growth post 2014, with Studwell answering agriculture and agriculture-related manufacturing as urbanization and population densities grow.
Finally, one thing I didn’t like about the book - Studwell is clearly biased to showing Africa in a positive light. While it’s great to for once having a positive book about Africa, it’s funny to compare the nice things he has to say about Ethiopia and Rwanda while saying worse things about the richer and better governed Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia. He also tip toes around the fact that most African countries are poorly governed from an industrial policy perspective and pins his hopes on the private sector and demographic trends figuring it out while that’s exactly where Southeast Asia failed and he rightly called them out on it.
Studwell is well known for his books about economic development in Asia and his thesis that the 3 universal pillars to grow are 1) create agricultural surpluses through improving smallholder productivity 2) get into manufacturing and move up the value chain and 3) financial repression to funnel high domestic savings in to domestic manufacturing domestic champions to help them grow. The thesis of this book is the same general principles, adapted to local circumstances, will work in Africa. Studwell doesn’t believe that there’s anything biological or geographical that will keep Africa permanently down. However, from a historical perspective, he points out that low population density due to historical (slavery) and geographic (diseases) reasons has prevented Africa from having the necessary ingredients for success until about the year 2000.
The book itself isn’t that prescriptive, pointing the reader towards his other books to learn more about the details of the 3 pillars, but instead is about applying that framework to African countries to explain successes and failures. Studwell is at his best when comparing and contrasting (How Asia Works is set up as a comparison between East and Southeast Asia) and that’s still true in this book as well. It’s fascinating to learn how Mauritius in the middle of nowhere was able to run a better export-oriented industrialization playbook and get substantially richer than Morocco which has a literal land border with the European Union. There is another interesting comparison between Botswana’s management of its mineral resources vs. pretty much every other country in Africa which have squandered away their resources, but at the same time the limits of how far Botswana could develop without a competitive manufacturing or agricultural sector.
Another positive of the book is that Studwell clearly loves agriculture and dives deep into farming and farming policy which I’ve never seen another book do. It was great to learn the history of African farming from small area, low productivity to bigger area, low productivity, to finally higher productivity under certain, political circumstances. It also explained a long running question I had of what’s driving African growth post 2014, with Studwell answering agriculture and agriculture-related manufacturing as urbanization and population densities grow.
Finally, one thing I didn’t like about the book - Studwell is clearly biased to showing Africa in a positive light. While it’s great to for once having a positive book about Africa, it’s funny to compare the nice things he has to say about Ethiopia and Rwanda while saying worse things about the richer and better governed Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia. He also tip toes around the fact that most African countries are poorly governed from an industrial policy perspective and pins his hopes on the private sector and demographic trends figuring it out while that’s exactly where Southeast Asia failed and he rightly called them out on it.
September 21, 2026
A joy to read a book that makes you smarter!
I speed-read this for my company's book club, and I'll admit I probably should've sat with it for a bit longer. My review, similarly, will be probably more terse than it should.
This is a helpful development framework for viewing the continent. It mostly draws throughlines between Asia's full-blown successes (China, S Korea, Singapore) and Africa's early glimmers (Ethiopia, Rwanda, Botswana, Mauritius).
A few concepts that blew my mind:
Smallholder agriculture is essentially a necessary prerequisite to commercial farming and industrial manufacturing. I thought this was the opposite! After working in the smallholder space, I was convinced commercial farming was needed! I was wrong! Smallholder productivity creates the necessary conditions for manufacturing and commercial farming to flourish. There's no evidence you can leapfrog!!
Africa has more than enough land. Population density throughout the continent remains low, even with the absurd demographic boom that we're living through. Not what I thought at all! It's hard to grok because if you spend time in cities (Nairobi, Lagos, Cairo) or certain areas (Great Lakes of Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda) you would never realize it. But there is a ton of land on the continent, which is weirdly bad for development. We should want it to be denser, i.e., we should look forward to the population boom, not dread it.
Exported services are not it. India's economy, while boosted by IT outsourcing, is not doing as well as comparable countries that invested more in exporting goods instead of services. Kind of fascinating. And I buy it! Again, I was wrong!!
Lastly, we are probably overhyping automation. Yes, AI exists and will change things. Yes, modern manufacturing is more automated. But I appreciated Studwell cutting out the hype and focusing on the basics.
You need to grow things, and then you need to make things. The world is changing, but not that much.
Ultimately a very useful book that was practical, optimistic, and focused on the continent as a whole. What more could you ask for!
I speed-read this for my company's book club, and I'll admit I probably should've sat with it for a bit longer. My review, similarly, will be probably more terse than it should.
This is a helpful development framework for viewing the continent. It mostly draws throughlines between Asia's full-blown successes (China, S Korea, Singapore) and Africa's early glimmers (Ethiopia, Rwanda, Botswana, Mauritius).
A few concepts that blew my mind:
Smallholder agriculture is essentially a necessary prerequisite to commercial farming and industrial manufacturing. I thought this was the opposite! After working in the smallholder space, I was convinced commercial farming was needed! I was wrong! Smallholder productivity creates the necessary conditions for manufacturing and commercial farming to flourish. There's no evidence you can leapfrog!!
Africa has more than enough land. Population density throughout the continent remains low, even with the absurd demographic boom that we're living through. Not what I thought at all! It's hard to grok because if you spend time in cities (Nairobi, Lagos, Cairo) or certain areas (Great Lakes of Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda) you would never realize it. But there is a ton of land on the continent, which is weirdly bad for development. We should want it to be denser, i.e., we should look forward to the population boom, not dread it.
Exported services are not it. India's economy, while boosted by IT outsourcing, is not doing as well as comparable countries that invested more in exporting goods instead of services. Kind of fascinating. And I buy it! Again, I was wrong!!
Lastly, we are probably overhyping automation. Yes, AI exists and will change things. Yes, modern manufacturing is more automated. But I appreciated Studwell cutting out the hype and focusing on the basics.
You need to grow things, and then you need to make things. The world is changing, but not that much.
Ultimately a very useful book that was practical, optimistic, and focused on the continent as a whole. What more could you ask for!
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
How Africa Works is an excellent and highly informative book that captures the diversity of African development experiences while clearly explaining the structural challenges the continent has faced.
Joe Studwell focuses on how development actually happens, showing how countries have experimented with agriculture reform, education, manufacturing, and state coordination to build economies, improve health and security, and drive growth.
One of the book’s strongest insights is that education alone guarantees nothing without effective developmental policy. Studwell shows that education delivers results only when embedded within strategies that create productive employment and export oriented growth.
A second key insight is the central importance of manufacturing; without deliberate efforts to build manufacturing capacity and unlock economies of scale, countries struggle to sustain growth.
The case studies of Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia, and Rwanda, demonstrate how the right mix of policy discipline, agricultural reform, manufacturing development, and institution building can drive economic growth, reform and lift populations out of poverty.
From an economic perspective, the book offers a compelling analysis of how African economies have had to adapt and diversify, shaped by population density, fragmented societies, language diversity, and historical constraints. While the impacts of post-colonial politics, corruption, and foreign influence could have been explored more deeply, the book nonetheless provides a rich and grounded understanding of how Africa works.
Clear, well-argued, meticulously researched and cautiously optimistic, How Africa Works makes a persuasive case that Africa, the world’s last great developmental frontier, is poised to play an increasingly important role on the global stage. This is a highly worthwhile read.
Joe Studwell focuses on how development actually happens, showing how countries have experimented with agriculture reform, education, manufacturing, and state coordination to build economies, improve health and security, and drive growth.
One of the book’s strongest insights is that education alone guarantees nothing without effective developmental policy. Studwell shows that education delivers results only when embedded within strategies that create productive employment and export oriented growth.
A second key insight is the central importance of manufacturing; without deliberate efforts to build manufacturing capacity and unlock economies of scale, countries struggle to sustain growth.
The case studies of Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia, and Rwanda, demonstrate how the right mix of policy discipline, agricultural reform, manufacturing development, and institution building can drive economic growth, reform and lift populations out of poverty.
From an economic perspective, the book offers a compelling analysis of how African economies have had to adapt and diversify, shaped by population density, fragmented societies, language diversity, and historical constraints. While the impacts of post-colonial politics, corruption, and foreign influence could have been explored more deeply, the book nonetheless provides a rich and grounded understanding of how Africa works.
Clear, well-argued, meticulously researched and cautiously optimistic, How Africa Works makes a persuasive case that Africa, the world’s last great developmental frontier, is poised to play an increasingly important role on the global stage. This is a highly worthwhile read.
April 18, 2026
Fascinating book, and nice to get back to economist roots. The main contribution of this book to my learning was to significantly broaden my understanding of African economies and how they vary. I enjoyed the case study approach, with the four nations of Mauritius, Botswana, Ethiopia, and Rwanda being well chosen for the sake of providing both a geographic, cultural, and economic diversity. While I had heard previous moderating voices on Rwanda, it was interesting to learn more about the autocratic tendencies of Paul Kagame and how they have impacted Rwanda’s developmental mission. I knew essentially nothing about Ethiopia and thus this section was also particularly interesting to me.
The book thoroughly endorses industrial policy as a method for achieving economic development, something that I am yet to be totally convinced by. I am particularly sceptical of the author’s endorsement of capital controls as a method of directing investment. He however makes a thorough and detailed case, relying heavily on his previous work on Asia. Probably most interesting however is his endorsement of land expropriations, a policy for which I’m not sure I’ve previously read a serious argument. I yet to be convinced that this last policy could be undertaken without massive negative consequences for the rule of law and society however I haven’t undertaken much research on the asian case studies he cites to support this. The references to Dani Rodrik made me want to revisit his work on manufacturing and urbanisation, both of which seem highly important.
Most importantly, I became much more optimistic while reading this book, which reminded of the huge strides towards eradicating poverty and other economic & social malaise that have taken place in Africa over the past 50-60 years since the wave of Independences occurred across the continent.
The book thoroughly endorses industrial policy as a method for achieving economic development, something that I am yet to be totally convinced by. I am particularly sceptical of the author’s endorsement of capital controls as a method of directing investment. He however makes a thorough and detailed case, relying heavily on his previous work on Asia. Probably most interesting however is his endorsement of land expropriations, a policy for which I’m not sure I’ve previously read a serious argument. I yet to be convinced that this last policy could be undertaken without massive negative consequences for the rule of law and society however I haven’t undertaken much research on the asian case studies he cites to support this. The references to Dani Rodrik made me want to revisit his work on manufacturing and urbanisation, both of which seem highly important.
Most importantly, I became much more optimistic while reading this book, which reminded of the huge strides towards eradicating poverty and other economic & social malaise that have taken place in Africa over the past 50-60 years since the wave of Independences occurred across the continent.
April 22, 2026
Spectacular analysis of development in Africa
How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World's Last Developmental Frontier is one of the most clear-eyed, data-driven, and refreshingly honest analyses of economic development I’ve read in years. Joe Studwell brings the same sharp analytical framework he used in How Asia Works and applies it to Africa—with results that are both sobering and deeply insightful.
What sets this book apart is its refusal to rely on vague narratives about “potential” or overly simplistic explanations for underdevelopment. Instead, Studwell methodically examines what has actually worked elsewhere—particularly in East Asia—and contrasts that with policy choices across African nations. His emphasis on agriculture, manufacturing, and disciplined economic policy provides a concrete roadmap rather than abstract theory.
The chapters on agricultural productivity are especially compelling. Studwell convincingly argues that broad-based rural development is not just helpful but foundational, and he explains how its absence has hindered sustained growth across much of the continent. Likewise, his critique of premature industrialization and dependence on extractive industries is both nuanced and backed by strong evidence.
Importantly, this is not a pessimistic book. While it doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges, it makes a powerful case that success is possible—and has already occurred in certain contexts—when governments align policy with proven development principles.
For anyone interested in international development, economics, or foreign policy—especially those working in or preparing for roles related to Africa—this book is essential reading. It challenges assumptions, sharpens thinking, and provides a framework that stays with you long after you’ve finished.
How Africa Works: Success and Failure on the World's Last Developmental Frontier is one of the most clear-eyed, data-driven, and refreshingly honest analyses of economic development I’ve read in years. Joe Studwell brings the same sharp analytical framework he used in How Asia Works and applies it to Africa—with results that are both sobering and deeply insightful.
What sets this book apart is its refusal to rely on vague narratives about “potential” or overly simplistic explanations for underdevelopment. Instead, Studwell methodically examines what has actually worked elsewhere—particularly in East Asia—and contrasts that with policy choices across African nations. His emphasis on agriculture, manufacturing, and disciplined economic policy provides a concrete roadmap rather than abstract theory.
The chapters on agricultural productivity are especially compelling. Studwell convincingly argues that broad-based rural development is not just helpful but foundational, and he explains how its absence has hindered sustained growth across much of the continent. Likewise, his critique of premature industrialization and dependence on extractive industries is both nuanced and backed by strong evidence.
Importantly, this is not a pessimistic book. While it doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges, it makes a powerful case that success is possible—and has already occurred in certain contexts—when governments align policy with proven development principles.
For anyone interested in international development, economics, or foreign policy—especially those working in or preparing for roles related to Africa—this book is essential reading. It challenges assumptions, sharpens thinking, and provides a framework that stays with you long after you’ve finished.
March 31, 2026
I love people who can write about "how X works". It requires conceptual sprawl and fox-style integration of diverse facts.
You can see this in how Studwell performed on Conversations With Tyler. Tyler opens with Nigeria as a counter-example to Studwell's argument that increasing population density was key to Asia's success and Africa's future. Studwell calmly says the Nigeria has under-performed relative to potential, partly because of ethnic conflict due to being split evenly 3 ways. Then Tyler turns to Botswana, rich but no population density. Studwell calmly points out their economy is dependent on 3 diamond mines. This is why Studwell doesn't try to write a book about all of Africa, and instead focuses on case-studies like Mozambique, Ethiopia, Rwanda etc.
The problem with fox-style integration is it's hard to say exactly what the author thinks, at least in a "concise takeaway" fashion. Maybe that's a good thing as "how Africa works" is clearly complex, but it's also frustrating for the reader.
Studwell believes in:
- Population density, a la East Asia, as a driver of economic growth
- Small-scale land holdings as an initial economic engine (see Ethiopia) because it can achieve high yields
- But also recommending a transition to manufacturing as a driver of converging wages (al a Danny Rodrick)
- Strong institutions, as evidenced by Mozambique (or was it Mauritius) faltering as they failed to capitalise on 70/80s growth in manufacturing
- Conflict being the ultimate killer of growth
- Global competition is important at disciplining infant industries (something African states fail with), and yet he's not a neo liberal markets guy
Fox fox fox.
Good book, I'll try and read How Asia Works when I get a chance.
You can see this in how Studwell performed on Conversations With Tyler. Tyler opens with Nigeria as a counter-example to Studwell's argument that increasing population density was key to Asia's success and Africa's future. Studwell calmly says the Nigeria has under-performed relative to potential, partly because of ethnic conflict due to being split evenly 3 ways. Then Tyler turns to Botswana, rich but no population density. Studwell calmly points out their economy is dependent on 3 diamond mines. This is why Studwell doesn't try to write a book about all of Africa, and instead focuses on case-studies like Mozambique, Ethiopia, Rwanda etc.
The problem with fox-style integration is it's hard to say exactly what the author thinks, at least in a "concise takeaway" fashion. Maybe that's a good thing as "how Africa works" is clearly complex, but it's also frustrating for the reader.
Studwell believes in:
- Population density, a la East Asia, as a driver of economic growth
- Small-scale land holdings as an initial economic engine (see Ethiopia) because it can achieve high yields
- But also recommending a transition to manufacturing as a driver of converging wages (al a Danny Rodrick)
- Strong institutions, as evidenced by Mozambique (or was it Mauritius) faltering as they failed to capitalise on 70/80s growth in manufacturing
- Conflict being the ultimate killer of growth
- Global competition is important at disciplining infant industries (something African states fail with), and yet he's not a neo liberal markets guy
Fox fox fox.
Good book, I'll try and read How Asia Works when I get a chance.
August 17, 2026
Joe Studwell explores the causes and the way for Africa to escape the continent's underdevelopment, in a book that offers the reassuring conclusion that the same formula that worked in East Asia can translate to inclusive, sustained growth for African economies. Studwell first discusses how Africa's small, dispersed population, along with toxic colonial legacies, have led to false starts in development. However, hope is on the way: population growth and reduced mortality have produced the denser urban environments that are a prerequisite to duplicating the East Asian economic miracle. Studwell then profiles four case studies of successful economic growth (Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia, and Rwanda) noting how different policy prescriptions have produced different outcomes and type of growth. In the end, Studwell concludes, the East Asian strategies of a focus on supporting agriculture, particularly smallholder farmers as opposed to inefficient large farms, followed by a focus on developing manufacturing, can pay off by delivering equitable growth. Industrial policy, he argues, is still at the heart of economic development. Studwell concludes by discussing the prospects for economic growth across Africa in the coming decades.
A book with something to say, and an optimistic, informed, and policy-centered take on Africa's future trajectory.
A book with something to say, and an optimistic, informed, and policy-centered take on Africa's future trajectory.
March 25, 2026
I had read good reviews of this book based largely on Studwell’s previous books on Asia. For someone who claims not to be an Africa expert and supposedly with very little prior knowledge, this is a remarkable tour de force. Some of the ‘pocket summaries’ of the regions and country’s histories are a bit simplistic but necessary nevertheless for readers new to the region. He focuses on four countries in detail - so called ‘success stories’ - Rwanda, Botswana, Mauritius and Ethiopia. Studwell concludes that those which invested in small holder agriculture and manufacturing have set the conditions for stability and prosperity.
July 12, 2026
Studwell strikes again. An absolutely fascinating and well paced book for how dense it is. Studwell is a master at time and time again repeating his thesis and his ideas until they’re engrained in your mind. His four major example countries, Botswana, Mauritius, Ethiopia, and Rwanda are all incredibly fascinating and well researched. It blew my mind to how Africa truly is the last frontier of development on planet earth. Strongly recommend for those not only interested in economical development, but also geopolitics, foreign affairs, and global finance.
August 3, 2026
Genuinely informative and amazingly well researched (the book itself ends halfway through: the rest is bibliography, index and acknowledgements) and wide ranging summary of Africa. Does suffer at times from repetition (not to be confused with reiteration) and excessively long lists, almost reminiscent of a GRRM table scene with a million and one different foods. Very very long too though I can forgive that. Nigeria is referenced quite a bit towards the end - perhaps it would’ve been a good focus country alongside the 4 included as a long term success story to compare to.
August 16, 2026
A top down view of how Africa works - extrapolated from examining 4 countries - that completely ignores the history of communist influence on large parts of the coninent and how that lead many countries to the state they are in, takes Mahmoud Mamdani's words as gospel fact, mainly ignores the high level of corruption and in general leaves little responsible for Africa's lack of development on the continent as a whole. He espouses the methods that lead to Asian economic growth with little regard to whether they will work in Africa.
September 13, 2026
Very interesting analysis of the economic aspects of the situation in Africa, a great addition to John Reader's Africa, which I had just finished before. It is mostly about economics, though it also gets into the political situation, as the two are closely related. It's refreshing to read something that is not all doom and gloom, but that does not shy away from criticizing what went wrong. While only time will tell if the author was right or not, it is definitely a useful analysis. My only qualm is that it gets a bit repetitive regarding some points.
September 30, 2026
I was so excited to start this but it’s so unengaging and poorly written i couldn’t finish it (I really tried).
Read for our book club and so persevered and analysed more than it deserves.
somewhere there are good stories here - but by lumping the whole continent of Africa into one story, they never quite emerge.
Constantly weighed down by an infinite number of statistics it reminds me of university essays desperate to show off how many sources they’ve asked ChatGPT to find for them.
Read for our book club and so persevered and analysed more than it deserves.
somewhere there are good stories here - but by lumping the whole continent of Africa into one story, they never quite emerge.
Constantly weighed down by an infinite number of statistics it reminds me of university essays desperate to show off how many sources they’ve asked ChatGPT to find for them.
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