Leander Heldring, James Robinson
How will Africa adjust to the COVID pandemic (Arezki et al. 2021)? Can it overcome the deep negative legacies of the slave trade (Nunn 2008) and colonialism (Heldring and Robinson 2013, Michalopoulos and Papaioannou 2017, Roessler et al. 2020) or deal with the mounting challenges of climate change (Rohner 2021)? Are there reasons to be optimistic about Africa’s development futures, and if so what are they?
In our research, we identify three latent assets which we argue suggest that there may be very different and much better economic times ahead for Africa (Henn and Robinson 2021). To see why this is plausible, note that while Africa might have had a very bad 400 years, prior to 1978 China had had at least a very bad 200 years. By the second half of the 18th century, the Qing state was collapsing fiscally and wracked by corruption. The granary system of social insurance withered away, the Grand Canal silted up, and China was convulsed by civil war
A FREEZING man who d been drinking alone in the hills above Port Glasgow on his birthday broke into a farmhouse in the early hours of the morning and clambered into a woman s bed. William King punched through a glass door pane to gain entry to the property before stripping out of his wet clothes and crawling under a duvet in the householder s spare room. Drunken King, 28, left a trail of blood from his bare-fisted blow to the door. It was followed by police who found him with a tub of ice cream he d stolen from the woman s fridge for a munch .