The topic: this seminar discusses the prospects for African catch-up development within the coming decade. Domestically, crucial factors will be African countries’ factor endowments (i.e. land, labour, capital, infrastructure, connectivity), and governance capacities (i.e. levels of regime stability and developmental leadership). Globally, one crucial factor will be the unfolding technological revolution (i.e. artificial intelligence and platform economies). This seminar will bring these domestic and global factors together to ask what African governments can do to initiate sustainable and inclusive growth.
Core questions will be:
– How can we classify African economies, and what roles can African workers play in the world of the 2020s?
– How can we classify African states, and what types of growth-inducing governance exist across the sub-continent?
– How does the global debate on artificial intelligence and job automation translate to Africa? Is catch-up development bound to happen or could we be moving toward greater geographical inequality and an eventual ‘useless class’ in the Global South?
– What role do platforms and internet connectivity play for inclusive growth in the 21st century? Which sectors are important? Will natural resources and agriculture remain dominant for Africa? Can manufacturing lead to catch-up development the way it did for East Asia? Or can a globalized services economy emerge as an alternative?
– How does the development of artificial intelligence affect African governance? Is data the new oil?
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