20% of Africans Live in Post-Conflict Fragile States

[Jefferson23]

Leonce Ndikumana, director of the African Policy Program at the Political Economy Research Institute, says poverty, inequality, weak institutions, and low development in general undermine efforts to accelerate economic development.

- May 18, 2015

Bio

Leonce Ndikumana is the Andrew Glyn Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He served as Director of Operational Policies and Director of Research at the African Development Bank, Chief of Macroeconomic Analysis at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), and visiting Professor at the University of Cape Town. He is an Honorary Professor of economics at the University of Stellenbosch. He has contributed to various areas of research and policy analysis on African countries, including the issues of external debt and capital flight, financial markets and growth, macroeconomic policies for growth and employment, and the economics of conflict and civil wars in Africa. He is co-author of Africa's Odious Debt: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent, in addition to dozens of academic articles and book chapters on African development and Macroeconomics. He is a graduate of the University of Burundi and received his doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Transcript


In Africa 20 of the 54 countries are classified as fragile states. They account for approximately 20 percent of the continent's population. In addition to lower per capita income, these countries lag behind in basic social and economic indicators of health, nutrition, and education. While poverty, inequality, weak institutions, and low development in general are the result of such fragility, they also undermine the very effort to improve things. But some people are trying to do so, to improve the conditions in these countries. And that is the topic of our next discussion with Leonce Ndikumana. Leonce is a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He's the director of the African Policy Program at the Political Economy Research Institute, also known as PERI, and the author of the paper Capital Flight From Sub-Saharan African Countries.

Leonce, thank you so much for joining us today.

LEONCE NDIKUMANA, DIR. AFRICAN POLICY PROGRAM, PERI: Thank you so much for the time and the opportunity.

PERIES: So Leonce, PERI and the African Development Bank engaged high-level civil servants in a workshop in Dakar, Senegal recently in an effort to address some of the gravest issues facing fragile states, as you have defined it, mainly the kind of reform required at the level of institutions. Give us some sense of what you presented to them.

NDIKUMANA: Thank you so much. So as you said in your introduction, Africa accounts for a large number of countries which are classified as fragile states, and these are countries which have problems in terms of delivering on economic, from the economic development front, in terms of social service delivery, but also have problems delivering in terms of--on the security side, you find that they are countries that have a hard time establishing security throughout their territory. And all these, these two combine to make it difficult for these, for those states to enforce credibility, to have credibility vis-a-vis the people, and vis-a-vis the global community.

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