After over three decades of decline post-independence, most of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has returned to growth, with all key indicators—growth, FDI, and, most importantly, poverty reduction—finally turning to green, as if the painful structural-adjustment policies of the 1990s were, finally, bearing fruit. This is a major change, and some of its drivers are visible on the ground. While still weakly mobilized, Africa’s elites have shed many of the wrongheaded ideologies that produced the disastrous policies of the 1970s and 80s. Many of the anti-growth “syndromes” identified by Fosu (2008) and their institutional manifestations such as protectionism, state-owned enterprises, export monopolies, and, in some cases, the entire breakdown of State institutions, have largely disappeared, while key economic institutions such as Central Banks and Customs were thoroughly modernized and, in the case of Customs, sometimes even cleaned up. .../...
