How Africa Works [Chapters 9 -10]

What Africa can learn - and not learn - from Asia

Manufacturing

At last, we arrive at the section I had been waiting for - though Studwell made us suffer for it. Reaching his discussion of manufacturing required wading through several hundred pages on agriculture, farm by painstaking farm. This reflects his rigid policy sequencing: in Studwell's schema, agriculture (done in a very specific way) must come first, and everything else must wait its turn. The trouble is that the story is not nearly as compelling as he imagines, and in telling it he falls into a familiar trope - one that has been a signature of writing about African agriculture for decades.

The durable template for writing about African agriculture goes something like this. Open with a vivid farmer vignette - typically a "noble" smallholder or, for variety, a surprisingly polished "professional farmer." Assert latent abundance: unused land, underexploited potential, the "last frontier," the "sleeping giant." Promise imminent take-off: Africa is "on the verge," this is "Africa's moment," now it is finally the continent's turn. Enumerate the familiar bottlenecks - inputs, roads, finance, tenure insecurity, missing markets, weak institutions. Close with an implicit (or explicit) pitch for investment or programmatic intervention. It is a genre unto itself, and once you learn to recognise it, you see it everywhere. In a section titled "Every Professional is at It," Studwell delivers a textbook example: the respectable modern farmer (civil servant, Toyota pickup, expanding acreage) is deployed to signal a new era, before the narrative pivots to the usual contrast with struggling smallholders and the case for state-led reform.

The telling detail is how long this template has remained publishable. You can find versions of it from the 1960s [William Allen’s The African Husbandsman PDF, page 2], the 1980s [Robert Chambers “the single largest resource not yet mobilized” PDF, page 14], 2009 [Awaking Africa’s Sleeping Giant?], 2011 [TIME Magazine “now it’s Africa’s turn”], 2012 [Reuters “blueprint for a 21st century agrarian revolution in Africa”], and now - with Studwell - in 2026: “the sector as a whole is in the best shape ever and at the vanguard of African development”. Something is wrong, and it ain’t the prose style.

The persistence suggests three things. First, the promised take-off is never institutionalised at scale; if it were, the genre would shift from anticipation to retrospective. Second, journalists and researchers can always locate pockets of change - a cooperative here, a commodity exchange there, a cohort of medium-scale farmers with Toyota pickups - but the system keeps producing exceptions rather than a new baseline. Third, the narrative survives because it is structurally useful to donors and investors ("last frontier," "sleeping giant"), and conveniently silent on the political economy of why scaling never happens. This is the permanent future tense of African agriculture. If, for more than sixty years, the sector is perpetually "on the verge," then the verge is not a stage of development but the story itself.

In How Asia Works, Studwell can write about agrarian transformation as settled history - the verge was crossed long ago, and farming sits firmly in the prologue, not the plot. In How Africa Works, the same take-off is still narrated in the present tense, as though the continent were permanently buffering at the starting line. This raises an awkward question. If Studwell's policy sequencing really is as rigid as he claims - agriculture first, then manufacturing - what are we to conclude when Africa keeps glitching at the agricultural verge? That the continent's manufacturing future is simply not going to happen? I do not think so. My own view is that the "agriculture leads development" story in Africa is finished, in the only sense that matters for strategy: we have learned, repeatedly and painfully, that waiting for a continent-wide farm take-off before doing anything else is a recipe for waiting forever. Which is precisely why manufacturing now feels more like urgent work that must proceed whether or not agriculture ever leaves the blocks.

I must be fair to Studwell, he does set up the manufacturing chapter by declaring that agriculture is now "on the move." The premise is that the agrarian precondition is being met and manufacturing is therefore free to begin its own journey. "The biggest developmental question that hangs over Africa today," he writes, "is whether substantial parts of the continent can begin a transition to manufacturing-based growth." So what, exactly, is holding it back? And why, after all this time, does Mauritius remain virtually alone in having made the transition?

Studwell’s account of manufacturing in Africa is essentially a story of structural disadvantage compounded by state failure. At independence, the continent’s sparse rural populations meant wages were roughly double those in Asia at comparable levels of development - a gap that made infant industries uncompetitive from the start. The import-substituting factories built in the 1960s and 1970s survived only behind rising tariff walls, and when structural adjustment arrived in the 1980s, most were swept away. Manufacturing’s share of GDP halved across much of the continent. Where enclaves did take root - garment sectors in Lesotho, Madagascar, Morocco - they often remained shallow: dependent on foreign capital, starved of local supply chains, and vulnerable to shifts in trade preference or investor sentiment. Infrastructure was poor, electricity unreliable, and logistics punishing. Meanwhile, most African governments either ignored industrial policy altogether or pursued it fitfully, producing little structural change.

Yet Studwell sees grounds for cautious hope. From the 2010s, Africa began turning a demographic corner: labour forces are doubling every twenty years, wages in several countries have fallen to between a tenth and a half of China’s, and exchange rates have become more competitive. Multinationals are testing the continent as a new frontier of cheap labour, Chinese firms already account for more than a tenth of African manufacturing output, and the African Continental Free Trade Area promises, in time, to knit the continent’s scattered megacities into something closer to a single addressable market. The conditions, in short, are shifting - though whether African states will supply the sustained industrial policy needed to exploit them remains the open question.

There is something glaring, to my mind, missing from all this. To make sure I was not imagining it, I went back to the relevant sections of How Asia Works - a book that was deeply formative for how I think about economic development. In it, Studwell recounted example after example of deliberate technological learning. In South Korea, Hyundai began by assembling Ford knock-down kits in 1967; Korean planners then ratcheted up the local-content requirement - from kit assembly to 20 per cent Korean-made components, then 60 per cent, and by 1973 to wholly indigenous passenger cars. Hyundai used cash flow from shipbuilding, a less complex industry, to keep funding the far harder learning curve in automobiles. POSCO, the steelmaker, initially rejected full computerisation so that its engineers could understand the manual workings of steelmaking first; within a decade, Nippon Steel no longer wished to cooperate because Korea was becoming a competitor. Japan's MITI compelled IBM to license its technology to Japanese firms in exchange for access to the Japanese market. Taiwan's semiconductor industry was built in part by returnees from the American West Coast who brought back not only technology but process knowledge.

Phot of KSTAR (Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research) artificial sun

Indeed, a feature of How Asia Works is that Studwell often explained success through failure. Malaysia's Perwaja was meant to produce high-value automotive steel for the national car, Proton, but ended up making protected construction steel instead - production without meaningful technological learning. Proton itself, shielded from export pressure and real domestic competition, never underwent the forced upgrading that transformed Hyundai. Throughout the book, Studwell's manufacturing examples are rarely just "country X made cars" or "country Y made steel." They are stories of how states compelled firms to move from assembly to components, from borrowed technology to process mastery, and from simple products to complex ones - always under the discipline of export markets.

I should be careful not to project Nigeria - a loud, overconfident country that talks far more than it delivers - onto the rest of Africa. But I have seen little to suggest the underlying problem is very different elsewhere. What is striking, above all, is the absence of technological learning and upgrading as a policy ambition. Manufacturing is treated as something you do by buying machines, importing equipment and starting production. The harder question - how to learn the technology, master the process, deepen local capability and move into more complex production - barely seems to arise. Many African “industrialists” take their cue accordingly. Technology is rarely discussed in political life, and almost never as a matter of national strategy. I have written about this before, most notably in cement, where after two decades of state protection and two dollar billionaires minted in the process, Nigeria remains technologically hollow in the actual making of the product. Seen in that light, it is no surprise that so many of Studwell’s manufacturing examples in this chapter are textiles. Africa is in no position to sneer at any manufacturing, and the employment effects of textiles matter. But textiles as a starting point are one thing; textiles as a horizon are another.

And this is not some new weakness produced by recent deindustrialisation. It is a long-standing problem, which only makes its persistence more damning. Discussing Wolfgang Stolper’s Inside Independent Nigeria with a friend this past weekend - he of the Stolper-Samuelson theorem - he pointed out how much technology and foreign technical expertise Nigeria and Africa already had access to in the early independence period. On a single page, Stolper moves from Rockefeller Brothers Fund feasibility studies, to an American-backed radio and TV assembly scheme aimed at the US market through Sears, to Westinghouse surveying a steel mill, to Krupp trying to sell another, and then to arguments over cement equity and government ownership. He even records the frustration in plain terms: “Every time you try to do something, government interferes.” The problem, in other words, was not that Africa lacked access to industrial technology or foreign know-how. It was that political elites never really treated those things as a school for domestic mastery. That makes it all the more disappointing that, sixty years later, a chapter on African manufacturing still ends up leaning so heavily on textiles.

One of the most interesting passages in the book came in Studwell’s account of Ethiopia, where he describes Meles Zenawi - channeling Gramsci’s Cultural Hegemony - wanting economic development to become “hegemonic” in national life: not just a government programme, but the default national position that requires no thinking. I kept returning to that idea while reading this chapter. Because technological learning - mastering process knowledge, moving from assembly to design, from installation to competence - is what needs to be made hegemonic in African policymaking. There is no shortcut around this. Without it, someone will write another book about manufacturing in Africa in a few decades and find the continent still circling the same low-skill activities and still reliant on foreign firms for the knowledge that actually matters. That a voice as respected in policy circles as Studwell’s should choose, on this point, to pull his punches is a real missed opportunity.

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This is my last entry in this read-along, and I cannot say this book met my expectations. Partly that is because How Asia Works set an almost impossible standard; whatever latter-day criticism has been thrown at that book, I still think it was a formidable piece of work. And to be fair to Studwell, the record he had to work with here is bleak. Africa’s failures of leadership are not his invention, and the references make clear how much reporting, travel and interviewing went into the project.

But some of the book’s weaknesses are self-inflicted. The deliberate decision to bracket corruption out of the analysis - as if one might discuss weight loss while ruling out calories - is absurd. And the habit of framing so many of the continent’s failures as inherited, structural or otherwise outside the choices of African rulers lets far too many of them off the hook, not least the one on the front-cover blurb.

This was a chance for the writer who, for my generation, did more than most to lift the hood on how Asia got rich to show, with the same clarity, what African success might look like amid African failure. Instead, I closed it with the nagging sense that Studwell had done for Africa what he never did for Asia: produced a taxonomy of constraints where he once offered a theory of transformation.

-Feyi

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Hello, Africa

Joe Studwell concludes his book, How Africa Works, by synthesising his core developmental theory into a practical checklist for the continent. Build a developmental coalition that can rise above ethnic fragmentation. Back smallholder agriculture. Move into export manufacturing. Use finance in a practical, state-directed way to support the whole process. This is the formula the book (and his work) is built upon, albeit with a reluctant dose of politics. Studwell's main strength is the rigid clarity of his prescription. He is explicit in his rejection of the idea of African exceptionalism and maintains that the same broad strategies that transformed East Asia are valid for Africa, provided that leaders can navigate the specific demographic and political constraints of their home countries. He argues that the historical constraint of low population density is finally easing, as the continent approaches the labour density that Asia possessed in 1960. This shift makes infrastructure and internal trade more viable than at any previous point in history.

The final chapter also addresses the role of international aid, arguing for aid as a useful but often mismanaged resource. Studwell rejects the polemical views that aid is inherently destructive, instead arguing that it has provided significant gains in public health and basic welfare. However, he critiques the aid industry for its fashion-driven nature and its tendency to bypass state institutions in favour of non-governmental organisations. He points to the East Asian experience as evidence that large-scale planning and aid can work when the recipient government remains in control of the agenda. Overall, Studwell is cautiously optimistic that Africa's time has come, and that adherence to his policy prescriptions is the key missing ingredient.

As I have written over the course of this read-along, a closer reading of Studwell exposes the limitations of his framework. However, what surprised me was how inflexible he is, such that his framework admits very little updating in the decade since he wrote How Asia Works. Economist and blogger Noah Smith had this to say:

Studwell’s model is so complex that it’s hard to test all the pieces together. And if you need all the pieces in place — for example, if export promotion doesn’t work without the “discipline” of winding up failing firms, or if land reform fails if you don’t allow farmers to sell their land, or if export discipline itself doesn’t work without land reform — then testing the pieces individually won’t give us the answers we want.

Because it’s so hard to test, the theory serves less as a tried-and-true policy prescription and more as a launching point for ideas about how to manage a developing economy. Encouragingly, the book looks to have sparked a change in economists’ attitudes toward industrial policy — even the IMF, which Studwell castigates for having discouraged smart pro-growth policies, is now thinking carefully about the ides in Studwell’s book.

But despite its value as a source of ideas, How Asia Works shouldn’t be treated as the Bible of development. Not only are its ideas hard to verify in their totality, but Studwell does make a few mistakes in his analysis of the economies of East Asia.

I doubt Studwell views himself as capable of mistakes because it is one thing to look back at the success of Asia, and divine what worked. But it certainly takes some form of superhuman confidence to look at Africa and boldly propose the same thing. The problem is not that agriculture, manufacturing, and finance do not matter. They do. The problem is that Studwell turns them into a rigid developmental script, and the evidence does not support that level of certainty.

The treatment of manufacturing provides a clear example of the limitations. Studwell argues that manufacturing is the decisive escalator because it raises productivity, absorbs labour leaving agriculture, and gives poor countries a route to catch up with richer ones. He leans on the familiar claim by economist Dani Rodrik that manufacturing is the sector of unconditional convergence¹. He then adds his own African gloss. In his account, Africa historically missed the factory phase because it was a poor region with unusually high wages, thin labour markets, and high costs. East Asia had dense reserves of underemployed rural labour. Africa did not. So what worked in one region was much harder to pull off in the other. Studwell is right that factor endowments mattered. He is also right that many African states industrialised badly, through protected assembly, prestige projects, and weakly disciplined firms. But his larger claim, that manufacturing still has a uniquely privileged developmental status of the old East Asian kind, is much less secure than he suggests.

The first problem is empirical. The older Rodrik claim about unconditional convergence in manufacturing has not aged well. A recent reassessment argues that Rodrik relied on data from the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), which covers the formal sector. Including data from small and informal firms weakens the headline results sharply. Newer and better data not only weaken the claim that poor countries naturally converge with rich countries in manufacturing, but the evidence also suggests more convergence in the service sector than in manufacturing². This is just one result, and it does not prove that manufacturing is no longer important. But it does strip away the strongest version of Studwell’s case. Dani Rodrik himself has moved toward a position in which manufacturing remains important, but is no longer the sole or even necessarily the main mass-employment route for development.

The second problem is historical timing. Even if one grants that manufacturing once played that role, the world economy that made East Asia’s export miracles possible is less available today. The changing nature of international trade today, with several interwoven factors like automation, digitisation, climate policy, resurgent industrial policy in rich countries, and a fragile geopolitical environment have all made the old export-led route harder to repeat. It is not impossible, but the scope has narrowed because the two main drivers, which are access to markets of rich countries and knowledge transfer, have come under intense pressure. This matters directly for Africa, because Studwell often writes as though Africa has now reached the point where it can finally do what East Asia once did.

Beyond empirical complications and historically frozen assumptions, there is a deeper inconsistency in this book. In the early chapters, Studwell spends a great deal of time explaining Africa’s harder structural inheritance: lower population density, weaker educational foundations, colonial distortions, ethnic fragmentation, and conflict. He explicitly says that Africa and East Asia cannot be compared because they began from different structural conditions. Yet Studwell insists throughout the book that there is no African exceptionalism in policy, and that following his policy sequence will yield the same results it did in Asia. If structural conditions matter as much as he says, then they cannot simply sit in the background while policy keeps explanatory primacy.

Studwell treats politics the same way he treats history, a background force that leaves his policy formula untouched. He does say in the last chapter that developmental coalitions are the preconditions for everything else, and that this is what most sharply distinguishes Africa from East Asia. If this is true, then I wonder what is left. Political development bargains, bureaucratic capability, and their role in successful policies play a very small role in Studwell's framework. One can only imagine Studwell, as the bearer of the only secret recipe to economic development, having a conversation with an African political leader.

African President: So, Mr Studwelli, I am told you possess the key that can solve all our problems. You have to share it with us o. Our people are complaining that the suffering is too much.

Joe Studwell: Yes sir, Mr President. The secret is with me in this book I have with me. But Mr President, the first thing you must do is to assume your country is in Asia.

Politics is not just a precondition, but it also determines which policies are possible and the institutions that implement policies. A study of export promotion in South Korea showed that the effect of industrial policy depended heavily on who implemented it. Better bureaucrats produced much stronger export outcomes.

In the end, this book is best read as a very good piece of storytelling. We are reminded that Africa is not hopeless, even better, that its moment to shine is at hand. It is also a familiar story. We have been telling it for 25 years. If Africa's development is truly delayed, then bringing the clock forward requires hard work. The problem is that the clocksmiths who are required to do the hard work are constantly being told it is their turn. Mr Studwell is merely the latest addition to this long line of fortune-tellers.

-Tobi

1. Unconditional Convergence in Manufacturing - Dani Rodrik

2. Unconditional Convergence in Manufacturing: A Reassessment - Berthold Herrendorf, Richard Rogerson and Akos Valentinyi ´