African Arguments

Top Menu

  • About Us
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

Main Menu

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
  • About Us
  • Write for us
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
  • Newsletter
  • RSS feed
  • Donate
  • Fellowship

logo

Header Banner

African Arguments

  • Home
  • Country
    • Central
      • Cameroon
      • Central African Republic
      • Chad
      • Congo-Brazzaville
      • Congo-Kinshasa
      • Equatorial Guinea
      • Gabon
    • East
      • Burundi
      • Comoros
      • Dijbouti
      • Eritrea
      • Ethiopia
      • Kenya
      • Rwanda
      • Seychelles
      • Somalia
      • Somaliland
      • South Sudan
      • Sudan
      • Tanzania
      • Uganda
      • Red Sea
    • North
      • Algeria
      • Egypt
      • Libya
      • Morocco
      • Tunisia
      • Western Sahara
    • Southern
      • Angola
      • Botswana
      • eSwatini
      • Lesotho
      • Madagascar
      • Malawi
      • Mauritius
      • Mozambique
      • Namibia
      • South Africa
      • Zambia
      • Zimbabwe
    • West
      • Benin
      • Burkina Faso
      • Cape Verde
      • Côte d’Ivoire
      • The Gambia
      • Ghana
      • Guinea
      • Guinea Bissau
      • Liberia
      • Mali
      • Mauritania
      • Niger
      • Nigeria
      • São Tomé and Príncipe
      • Senegal
      • Sierra Leone
      • Togo
  • Politics
    • Elections Map
  • Economy
  • Society
    • Climate crisis
  • Culture
  • Specials
    • From the fellows
    • Radical Activism in Africa
    • On Food Security & COVID19
    • #EndSARS
    • Covid-19
    • Travelling While African
    • From the wit-hole countries…
    • Living in Translation
    • Red Sea
    • Beautiful Game
  • Podcast
    • Into Africa Podcast
    • Africa Science Focus Podcast
    • Think African Podcast
  • Debating Ideas
Politics

“African economies must diversify and stimulate industrial development” – interview with Richard Kozul-Wright, United Nations Commission on Trade and Development

By Uncategorised
September 16, 2013
2386
0
Share:
Kozul-Wright

Richard-Kozul Wright is head of UNCTAD’s Unit on Economic Integration and Cooperation Among Developing Countries.

“The export-your-way-to-prosperity model is dead – didn’t work in the boom years prior to 2007…and won’t work now.” So says a rather combative press release from the United Nations Commission of Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) annual Trade and Development report.

Richard Kozul-Wright, head of UNCTAD’s Unit on Economic Integration and Cooperation Among Developing Countries, appears slightly more nuanced in his analysis, but the thrust is similar:

“The big challenge for primary exporters [including most African countries] is whether they can use the rents they have gained from rising commodities prices in a way that at least begins a diversification process.”

The “˜Africa Rising’ narrative, which we hear so much of at present, is largely based on African countries feeding industry in Asia with raw materials to produce goods for final sale in the US and EU.

Kozul-Wright, however, argues that this will not cut it for African countries eager to drastically grow and diversify their economies. “We are slightly manufacturing fundamentalists” he says, so in UNCTAD’s analysis “they’ve got to find some way to do it [manufacturing].” This will have to start by building up the supply capacity in relatively unsophisticated manufacturing activities.

The current “˜commodities supercycle’ will not last forever. The expectation is that prices, which have come down significantly since their high point of 08/09, will not rise significantly again. The big question in this regard is whether commodities producers have become weaned on rising prices as part of their growth model. If they have, then a drop in prices will be problematic. Consequently, there is need to create greater domestic demand and provide “much-needed ballast” to make countries less vulnerable to shifts in the global economy.

Looking at specific African countries, Kozul-Wright has praise for Ethiopia which he says is gaining a lot of, perhaps deserved, attention. But the African countries which could realistically have become dynamic regional hubs – Nigeria, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, for example – have not made the progress their potential suggested.

Brics countries, particularly China, have done some positive things in the last decade, but much of the growth in these countries is dependent on external capital markets. Decoupling from western capital markets, apart from China, is largely a myth.

Africa (and the rest of the Global South) does not benefit when the North is growing slowly. To this end, UNCTAD would like to see a rejection of “˜austerity economics’. All you get when the global north struggles economically is “a poor form of convergence.”

UNCTAD is most disappointed that there has been no proper reform of the international financial system and we still live in a world where highly speculative short-term financial flows dominate the movement of capital. The threat from this remains as great as ever and the failure to reform international financial architecture, which is the responsibility of rich countries, remains a problem for the developing world.

Kozul-Wright calls for “a return to some of the unfashionable methods of the past.” For example, industrial policy and development banks.

African policy-makers are aware that listening to the World Bank for the last 25 years has not served them well. What’s changed is that they can now turn to other countries in the global South rather than The Bank or the OECD for lessons and, particularly in the case of China, loans.

Says Kozul-Wright, “African policy-makers went through structural adjustment, that didn’t work, so they are more willing to listen to…heterodox solutions…development banks, for example.” In this regard, the newly proposed Brics Development Bank could be “something of a game-changer”.

Interview by Magnus Taylor – Editor, African Arguments. 

Previous Article

Somalia: government must downsize its vision over ...

Next Article

Food crisis in Zimbabwe: 2.2 million at ...

Uncategorised

Leave a reply Cancel reply

  • Politics

    South Kordofan: The Next Electoral Challenge

  • CultureGPJZimbabwe

    Zimbabwe: The rise and rise of the wedding before the wedding

  • Politics

    Welcome to Business Africa

Subscribe to our newsletter

Click here to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter and never miss a thing!

  • 81664
    Followers

Find us on Facebook

Interactive Elections Map

Keep up to date with all the African elections.

Popular articles

  • Evangelista Kanohili sits outside her home in Sheema, Uganda, March 15, 2022. Kanohili has been experiencing on-and-off infestations of jiggers, a small parasitic flea that burrows into the skin and can make it too painful to take care of daily tasks. Credit: Apophia Agiresaasi/Global Press Journal.

    Uganda: The tiny flea making it painful for people to walk and work

  • “Too much propaganda”: Zimbabwe’s pirates of the airwaves look to SA

  • Charity Nyoni, one of the growing number of women in Zimbabwe’s construction industry, tests paint on a board in a Victoria Falls showroom. Credit: Fortune Moyo/Global Press Journal.

    Building houses while knocking down gender barriers in Zimbabwe

  • Typical coping strategies such as a nomadic lifestyle are inadequate to handle what is potentially the worst food crisis in Somalia's recent past. Credit: UNDP Somalia.

    Somalia faces worst humanitarian crisis in recent history

  • #StopEACOP TotalEnergies Uganda Tanzania

    The bold campaign to defund the East African Crude Oil Pipeline

Brought to you by


Creative Commons

Creative Commons Licence
Articles on African Arguments are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
  • Cookies
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
  • en English
    am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu
© Copyright African Arguments 2020
Cleantalk Pixel
By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies.
en English
am Amharicar Arabicny Chichewazh-CN Chinese (Simplified)en Englishfr Frenchde Germanha Hausait Italianpt Portuguesest Sesothosn Shonaes Spanishsw Swahilixh Xhosayo Yorubazu Zulu