Abstract
In the light of economic history, each of the three main regions of the developing world, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and South-Eastern Asia, exhibits structural idiosyncrasies that make it difficult to draw policy lessons from the others. Sub-Saharan Africa is characterized by the long standing combination of a lack of labor and a lack of capital, relatively to land (and natural resources) abundance. A lowly productive agriculture with rudimentary technologies on the one hand, the absence of settlement colonization from Europeans (except Austral Africa) - slave exports instead - on the other hand, account for these factoral intensities. It is plausible that such basic features determined many others, even cultural or institutional, that are shared today by African societies. Not only agricultural yields remain low, and industrialization did not take root. Also family structures are original, institutions controlling scarce resources (like labor or capital) through lineages or extended kinship are strong, and State-like monopoly of violence is not settled. The main changes brought about by the colonial and early postcolonial periods were perhaps twofold: a "gatekeeper" State associated with a dual economy, and a demographic explosion. The latter is bound to put the former under stress. However it is still unclear how long the gatekeeper/dual model can survive, in the current state of the world economy and given natural resources availability. My contribution will illustrate these main lines with recent and ongoing research works of my own and others, and discuss where research in development economics and economic history could go to diminish the vast areas of our ignorance on Africa.
