Transcript
ERNEST ARYEETEY: I think the issue of how the current crisis is hitting Africa is one that has been quite widely discussed -- one that clearly has considerable implication for the way the rest of the world looks at Africa. The main message that I would like to share with you in this regard is that the situation is quite bad, but could have been much worse than it is today. The main reason for making that point about being bad, but could have been worse, is driven by what I see as the response of the African governments to the current crisis. The response to this particular crisis has been much different from the way they responded to earlier crisis beginning from the 1970s. It is quite different and one sees in almost every African country how this new response has reflected on the performance of economies. We can talk about growth prospects and, in that regard, we can look at the way the boom years influenced, to a very large extent, rapid growth in many African economies -- to the extent that there are many -- more than 11 countries -- that saw more than 10 percent growth in the two years prior to the crisis. So many African countries -- particularly the commodity exporting -- the world's large commodity exporting ones -- saw considerable improvements in the growth situation. So it isn't surprising that with the crises that many of them began to suffer.
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