Low Investment is not the Constraint on African Development

April 2003
William Easterly, Shanta Devarajan, and Howard Pack
Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 51, No. 3, 547-571.

Low Investment is not the Constraint on African Development
While many analysts decry the lack of sufficient investment in Africa, we find no evidence that private and public investment are productive, either in Africa as a whole (unless Botswana is included in the sample), or in the manufacturing sector in Tanzania. In this restricted sense, inadequate investment is not the major obstacle to African economic development.