Africa's differences with other regions lie not in aid, but in circumstances and history. Unlike South Asia, for example, Africa has not yet had a Green Revolution of higher food yields, the formative event of India's economic takeoff from the late 1960s. India is a civilisation of great river systems and large-scale irrigation, thanks to the Himalayan snowmelt and glacier melt and the annual monsoon rains. Africa is a continent of rain-fed (non-irrigation) agriculture. The original Green Revolution, in which India's food output per land area rose markedly, came in the irrigated systems of Asia, not the rain-fed systems of Africa.
US aid heavily subsidised India's Green Revolution while World Bank opposition to aid for African agriculture from the 1980s until recently played an opposite and adverse role, holding back a similar breakthrough for Africa. It was the absence of aid for African agriculture rather than its presence that cost Africa mightily. And one can go on. Africa's tropical disease burden, heavy concentration of landlocked countries, decline of aid for infrastructure during the 1980s and 1990s, and misguided attempts by Africa's creditors to collect debt servicing under "structural adjustment programs" during the 1980s and 1990s all played their part.
Isn’t rapidly growing India also in the tropics? Yes, but they have snowmelt-fed irrigation instead of rain-fed agriculture. Isn’t rich Singapore also in the tropics? Yes, but they are coastal instead of landlocked. Don’t Latin America and Asia also have tropical diseases like malaria, just like Africa? Yes, but they have a better kind of mosquito. So a region will be poor if they are tropical, if rainfed, iflandlocked, and if they have the wrong mosquitoes – which, yes, fits many African countries. The reason for Occam’s Razor is that with enough Ifs, Buts, and Excepts you can fit any theory to any set of facts. [...]
The other problem with Sachs’ geography story is that it has already been refuted by other economists. The consensus among several prominent academic papers is that destructive governments rather than destructive geography explain the poverty of nations. Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson (2006), Easterly and Levine (2003), and Rodrik, Subramanian, and Trebbi (2004) all tested the geography story against the institutions story and came down on the side of institutions.
Geography may have had some influence on history, but through institutions – good government spread along lines of migration and communication through most temperate regions more easily than it did to tropical regions. The latter were also victims of colonialism (and in Africa’s case, the slave trade as well, which goes some way to explain bad government in Africa today).
So Robert Mugabe was a lot worse for Zimbabwe than the Anopheles mosquito. Corruption is more fatal for oil-rich Nigeria and Angola than latitude. Health is determined more by public actions against disease than by species of parasite. Other factors that Sachs mentions, such as illiteracy and poor infrastructure, are also symptoms of bad government services.
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