Before, during and after the US Africa summit one of the most frequently repeated factoids supporting the Africa Rising meme was that 'seven out of ten fastest growing economies are in Africa.' In reality this is both a far less accurate and much less impressive statistic than it sounds. More generally, narratives on African economic development tend to be loosely connected to facts, and instead are driven more by hype. *** The 'seven out of ten' meme derives from a data exercise done in 2011 by The Economist. The exercise excluded countries with a population of less than 10 million and also the post-conflict booming Iraq and Afghanistan. This left 81 countries, 28 of them in Africa (more than 3 out of 10) and, if you take out the OECD countries from the sample, (which are unlikely to grow at more than 7 percent per annum), you find that every second economy in the sample is in Africa. It might not give the same rhetorical effect to say: 'on average some African economies are expected to grow slightly faster than other non-OECD countries,' but that would be more accurate. And before we literally get ahead of ourselves (The Economist was [...]
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