Human Development: an African Perspective

For many years now, the economic news coming out of Africa has been one of unrelieved gloom. The 1980s have repeatedly and emphatically been described as a lost development decade, and the 1990s have not made a more auspicious beginning. In fact, while economic growth rates averaged to merely 2 per cent per annum during the 1980s, the regional GDP grew at an even lower average annual rate of only 1.3 per cent, causing per capita incomes to fall by 1.8 per cent annually during the first four years of the present decade.