Sub-Saharan Africa by the numbers

To put this in perspective, Angola exports almost as much oil as Nigeria but has only about one tenth the population. However the Angolan oil boom, while it has made a small privileged class wealthy, has done little to benefit the general populace. The broad-based advance seen in SE Asian economies is absent from Angola.

Of course GDP in current dollars does not tell you much about how well-off people are. Price levels vary from country to country. I remember how shocked I was when I translated the price of fruit and vegetable in Australia into South African rand.

Here we see per capita GDP on a "purchasing power parity" or PPP basis for the same countries.

(Source: CIA World Factbook)

As we can see the countries that did well using our RPI are richer, on average, than those that did poorly. We also see that South Africa and, to a lesser extent Angola, excepted, sub-Saharan Africa is now much poorer than SE Asia.

Leaving out the special case of South Africa, only one sub-Saharan African country, Angola, thanks to its oil windfall, is in the same class as even the poorer SE Asian countries. And remember, back in 1960, Africa was by some measures a bit richer than SE Asia.

Compare, for the moment, Angola and Indonesia. In terms of per capita GDP Angola appears richer than Indonesia. But 40% of Angolan households live below the poverty line compared to 14% of Indonesian households. Both countries, of course, are still struggling with poverty but the benefits of growth in Indonesia have been more evenly spread than in Angola. In fact Angola is a more unequal society than the much poorer Ghana. This is typical of countries that get rich quickly due to a minerals boom. Wealth gets concentrated in very few hands.

Here are some more statistics about sub-Saharan Africa.

· The region is home to 13 of the world's 20 poorest countries as measured by purchasing power adjusted, per capita GDP

· 15 of the 20 countries with the highest total fertility rates are to be found in the region. With an average of 4.9 children per woman the sub-Saharan African population is exploding. Increased numbers could wipe out economic gains

· 17 of the world's 20 countries with the highest rates of illiteracy are in sub-Saharan Africa. In some ways I think this is the worst statistic of them all.