Can Africa Follow Asia's Playbook?
In 2013, Joe Studwell published How Asia Works, a book that Tyler Cowen called the best treatment of Asian industrial policy available and that Bill Gates made required reading for his foundation's agriculture team. The thesis was deceptively simple: land reform, export discipline, and state-directed finance explained the extraordinary growth of East Asia. A decade later, Studwell has returned with How Africa Works, attempting to apply the same framework to a continent whose economic trajectory has diverged sharply from the optimism of that earlier era.
The sequel arrives at a sobering moment. Africa has not grown at all in per capita terms over the past decade. China's growth has halved. The global conditions that enabled the East Asian miracle have shifted in ways that may be irreversible.
The Weight of History
Studwell opens by dismantling the popular narrative that Africa and East Asia started from comparable positions at independence. The numbers, he argues, were always misleading.
The supposedly high incomes per person in Africa don't match, for example, with the fact that life expectancy was two years lower than in South Asia and between 6 and 20 years lower than the level of countries in East and Southeast Asia.
The inherited disadvantages were staggering. Population densities across Africa were less than 25 percent of those in East and South Asia. Colonial powers had extracted labor and resources while building almost nothing. The Democratic Republic of Congo, with a population of 15 million, had just 30 university graduates when Belgium departed in 1960. Ethnic and linguistic fragmentation locked post-independence politics into patronage networks that persisted for decades.
This is the strongest section of the book. Studwell is meticulous in showing that the Afro-pessimist position, which blames postcolonial misgovernment for the continent's struggles, rests on a flawed reading of the evidence. The starting conditions were genuinely worse, shaped by slavery, disease, low population density, and institutional vacuums that no amount of good governance could quickly overcome.
Where the Model Actually Works
Studwell's three-part prescription calls for redistributing agricultural land to smallholders, channeling state support toward export-oriented manufacturers, and directing credit toward investment rather than consumption. Of these three pillars, only the first finds consistent support in the African evidence.
The agricultural case is compelling. Across the continent, governments have repeatedly subsidized large farms that prove less productive than smallholdings. In Ghana, a program nominally designed to help small farmers required applicants to own over 40 hectares and a tractor. In Zambia, the results of land consolidation were damning:
Among medium-scale farmers in Zambia, only 11 percent of such farms were cultivated, compared to 91 percent of smallholder land.
Ethiopia offers the clearest success story. Under deliberate policy, the government expanded fertilizer distribution almost a thousandfold between 1995 and 1999. The results were dramatic.
In Ethiopia, crop production more than doubled between 2004 and 2014, and continued to grow during periods of crisis afterwards. Extreme poverty fell by over 25 percentage points between 2000 and 2015.
These are not marginal gains. They represent genuine transformation in the lives of millions. Studwell deserves credit for documenting them with care and specificity.
The Manufacturing Gap
Beyond agriculture, however, the argument thins considerably. Studwell insists that manufacturing is the essential engine of development, yet the four African case studies he examines tell a different story.
Botswana grew rich on diamonds, not factories. It managed its resource wealth with admirable discipline, securing two-thirds of diamond extraction profits and investing in education and infrastructure. But it never built a manufacturing base. By the 1990s, five percent of the population owned half of all cattle, and manufacturing subsidies rewarded loyalty more than efficiency. Studwell himself concedes the point:
Studwell himself describes the country as a "gatekeeping state" that managed wealth without knowing how to grow it.
Rwanda adopted Singaporean rhetoric but lacked Singaporean advantages. Landlocked and energy-poor, with electricity costs roughly five times those of neighboring Ethiopia, its growth came through tourism and services rather than industry. Mauritius actually did pursue export-oriented manufacturing, but pivoted to tourism and offshore finance, precisely the sectors Studwell is most dismissive of in How Asia Works.
Even Ethiopia, the most compelling case, disappoints on manufacturing. Massive infrastructure projects reduced electricity costs to among the lowest on the continent, yet the successes Studwell highlights are concentrated in low-value-added sectors like cement. The highest manufacturing share of output for any large African country is Zimbabwe at 16 percent, compared with China's 25 percent at 80 times the population.
Studwell acknowledges the stakes plainly enough:
It is likely that manufacturing -- or its absence -- will be the single biggest divider between African economic success stories and the nations that are left behind.
But he spends remarkably little time interrogating whether that manufacturing growth is actually happening. This is the book's central tension, and Studwell never fully resolves it.
A Harder World for Late Industrializers
The most serious challenge to Studwell's thesis is not historical but structural. The conditions that enabled East Asian industrialization have changed fundamentally.
When China began its ascent, its wages were roughly one-fiftieth of American levels. African labor costs today are between a half and a tenth of Chinese levels -- a far smaller advantage. And those African workers must now compete against a country with world-class logistics infrastructure, extraordinary labor productivity, and an industrial ecosystem without parallel.
China remains by far the world's largest textile exporter, comparable to its position in 2008, even as it has become the largest exporter of smartphones, semiconductors, and electric motors and batteries.
China has not vacated the low end of manufacturing as earlier industrializers did. It dominates textiles and smartphones simultaneously. Meanwhile, automation is eroding the value of cheap labor itself. American manufacturing output quintupled between 1960 and 2015 while employment fell by nearly a third.
Economists have identified this pattern as premature deindustrialization: poor countries are losing their manufacturing sectors at much lower levels of income than the West ever did. The ladder that East Asia climbed may be pulling up behind it.
It is worth noting, though, that development economics has a long history of declaring paths closed just before someone finds a way through. The structural headwinds are real, but Studwell could reasonably argue that no one predicted China's rise either. The question is whether conviction alone constitutes an argument.
The Services Question
Studwell is dismissive of services-led growth, insisting that countries must focus singularly on manufacturing. This is where the reviewer, Saarthak Gupta, pushes back most effectively.
While countries continue to deindustrialize earlier than before, services offer viable, if unspectacular, alternatives, and India's experience suggests that a services-oriented economy can sustain growth well above the African average, even if well below China's.
India's trajectory challenges Studwell's framework directly. Its growth has been driven overwhelmingly by services -- information technology, business process outsourcing, financial services -- rather than by the manufacturing escalator that Studwell considers indispensable. Rwanda's bet on tourism and services may reflect pragmatism rather than failure.
Studwell's refusal to engage seriously with this alternative weakens the book. If the manufacturing path is genuinely harder than before, then dismissing the only visible alternative without sustained analysis is a significant omission.
Bottom Line
How Africa Works is two books in one. The first, a historical account of Africa's colonial inheritance and the case for smallholder agriculture, is careful, evidence-rich, and persuasive. The second, an argument that export-oriented manufacturing remains the only viable path to African prosperity, is asserted more than demonstrated.
That the honest answer to his book's central question may be that nobody knows is not a failure of the argument so much as a reflection of the moment. But a book more willing to acknowledge this would have served its subject better.
Studwell's great contribution in How Asia Works was showing that policy choices matter enormously, that countries are not condemned by geography or culture to particular outcomes. That insight carries forward. His case studies of Ethiopian agriculture and Botswana's diamond management demonstrate that African states can, in fact, govern effectively toward development goals.
But the world has changed since the East Asian miracle, and Studwell has not fully updated his model to account for it. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in African development. It is less convincing as a policy prescription for what comes next.