One of the most encouraging aspects of the 21st century so far is the perceptible transition of Africa – the perennial underachiever of history – from centuries of sluggish, if any, economic growth to a new era of development. A new report published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in April 2011 sheds some light on Africa's new-fangled progress and the outlook for the foreseeable future. It is still a complex picture not devoid of risks and problems, but on the whole Africa is making strides in the right direction.

In the context of the global economy today, some of the best things that any economy can have going for it is a strong recovery from the global financial crisis. This, the IMF report makes clear from the outset, is indeed the case for Africa, which on aggregate registered 5 percent GDP growth in 2010, with a forecast for 5.5 percent for 2011 and 6 percent for 2012. From a continent-wide perspective, the picture is thus broadly encouraging, yet from a regional perspective there are great variations in growth. In fact, most of Africa's 29 low-income countries as well as its seven oil exporters have returned to pre-crisis growth patterns, but progress in the eight middle-income countries has been more muted.

African economies 

The IMF report identifies three types of economies in Africa:

• Natural resource-intensive exporters, comprising seven oil exporters plus Botswana, Zambia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea - all countries where natural resource exports contribute more than 30 percent of exports

• Middle-income diversified exporters, consisting of seven countries comprising South Africa and six others

• 26 low-income diversified exporters

Mixed fortunes

Of the middle-income economies, South Africa in particular presents a complicated picture. South Africa is a giant in the region, accounting for 30 percent of sub-Saharan Africa's GDP, and it is incidentally the only country (along with Mauritius) that reports unemployment figures. These are rather depressing, with the country shedding around 8 percent of its job force during the crisis, to add to close to a 30 percent jobless rate. Consumer confidence has barely recovered from the knock it took during the crisis, and household indebtedness remains high at around 79 percent of disposable income.

Revenues in the 26 low-income countries were affected only modestly during the crisis and have recovered close to pre-crisis – albeit still very low – levels. In the middle income countries, revenues have not yet fully recovered, while for natural resource-intensive exporters, the behavior of commodity prices largely determines the level of revenue. In 2011-12, on the back of the current high commodity prices, the revenue-to-GDP ratio in these countries is projected to recover to around 26 percent of GDP, comparable to pre-crisis levels. The trade balance of six of the seven oil-exporting countries (Angola, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Nigeria, and Republic of Congo) in the region, moreover, is projected to improve by more than 10 percentage points in 2011 due to increasing oil prices, while Zambia is set for an increase of more than 6 percent on account of higher copper prices. 

New era for Africa?

The short answer that the IMF offers to this question in this new report is: Yes. The report cites three other recent studies that have reinforced this proposition, namely another IMF report from 2008 that identified 17 "Great sub-Saharan Takeoff" economies which had achieved average per-capita growth rates above 2.5 percent since the mid-1990s; the book Emerging Africa by Steven Radelet, published in 2010, which identified 17 non-oil-exporting emerging economies based on growth as well as other social indicators; and a report from The Economist in early 2011 that found six of the world's fastest-growing (so-called "Lion Kings") economies to be from sub-Saharan Africa.

An acceleration of growth in sub-Saharan Africa in the last decade was not unique, as many other regions like Latin American and the Caribbean (LAC), the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), and Developing Asia did so as well. Yet the fact that sub-Saharan Africa's strongest economies performed as well as, if not better than, countries in other regions is a sure sign of a break with the past. Furthermore, the fact that Africa is growing at all and is, to be sure, growing rapidly for over a decade, is indicative of a new era. The continent's recovery from the crisis is broadly perceptible but nonetheless patchy, as described above, and the middle-income economies especially are not quite past the post yet. Nevertheless, Africa is growing – finally.

The IMF Regional Economic Outlook: Sub-Saharan Africa was released in April 2011 and is available on the IMF's website, www.imf.org.

 The author is a Senior Consultant at The Beijing Axis