Introduction

Recent press reports suggest that Africa may now be at a turning point in terms of economic growth and development. These reports point out that, although starting from a low base, Africa is now the world's fastest growing continent. However, naive optimism on this ground should be avoided (Karuri-Sebina et al. 2012). The recent growth has been concentrated in particular countries and sectors and the transformation of growth into sustainable social and economic progress will not happen automatically.

There is thus a discrepancy between the reporting of record growth rates for African economies in media and the reality of how people's living conditions have evolved over the last decade in the African high growth economies. The widely shared understanding among development scholars that registered economic growth and development must be seen as two distinct, even if related, processes has become more evident than ever. In this chapter, we will argue that in order to transform the economic upswing as measured by gross domestic product, fast-growing African countries need structural and institutional change across the economic, social and political spheres that bring them closer to what we will refer to as ‘learning economies’.

The widening of the gap between reality on the ground and perceptions based on growth rates reflects partly that the increasing global demand for natural resources – especially for commodities such as oil and minerals – has led to advantageous change in terms of trade, to increased export volumes and raised the rates of GNP growth while the impact on domestic employment has often been limited and sometimes negative. The expansion of the commodity sector does not automatically create large-scale employment directly and so far it has rarely resulted in a substantial increase in job creation in upstream and downstream manufacturing and in knowledge-based services.

It has even been argued that the structural change that occurred in lowincome economies with high rates of growth had a negative impact on the potential for future aggregate economic growth (McMillan and Rodrik 2011).