Asia–Africa Development Divergence: A Question of Intent by David Henley (review)

Despite decades of international efforts to sustain developmental growth through the use of foreign aid and economic structural adjustments, development in contemporary Africa has generally paled in comparison to the likes of Southeast Asia. Indeed, one might have expected Africa's political elites to have taken heed of the challenges and successes that facilitated the meteoritic levels of development and economic growth witnessed in Southeast Asia during the 1960s. Yet the perennial question concerning Africa's enduring difficulties in achieving similar development success, despite starting out on comparable footing with Southeast Asia, has remained largely underexplored.

Therefore it is perhaps timely that David Henley attempts to address this persistent issue through an appropriately comparative paradigm in Asia–Africa Development Divergence. Through the book, Henley posits an alternative thesis to explain Africa's digression in development by examining the necessary preconditions for developmental growth — as exhibited in post-independence Southeast Asia — and for it to be sustained in Africa. While the notion for comparing the two regions is certainly not a novel one, few in academia have drawn insightful lessons from an in-depth comparative analysis of Africa and Southeast Asia quite like the "Tracking Development" project, in which Henley was involved. It is from the fruits of this five-year project by KITLV and the African Studies Centre Leiden, from which this book and the ambitious edited volume, Asian Tigers, African Lions (see Berendsen et al. 2013), were derived. As a follow-up to the monumental undertaking that preceded it, Henley's book does not attempt to rethread familiar ground but instead explores the societal and historical developments coupled with world views that ultimately shaped the policy decisions taken by African and Southeast Asian elites, which resulted in sharply different development trajectories in the two regions. It is no small feat then that Henley achieves this goal, quite convincingly, in a concise book that spans seven short chapters.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of development history in Africa and Southeast Asia as well as introducing Henley's analytical framework, used in the book's comparative cases of Indonesia–Nigeria, Malaysia–Kenya and Vietnam–Tanzania. It is here where Henley outlines his proposed preconditions for developmental growth (economic freedom, macroeconomic stability, and pro-poor/pro rural public spending). In addition to the framework's preconditions, differences in the political elites' perception and prioritization of the development process, are treated by Henley as the linchpins to the divergence in development paths between Africa and Southeast Asia. Chapter 2 reviews the existing discourse on the development trajectories of Southeast Asia and Africa, while Chapter 3 delves into the first two of Henley's three preconditions for sustainable growth and poverty reduction, namely macroeconomic stability and economic freedom. It is here where Henley makes clear that the maintenance of low inflation rates and a fairly liberalized economy, combined with fiscal prudency, were key to enabling sustainable economic growth in Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam, which in turn secured sufficient levels of state revenue and investment in human capital to permit these countries to make the leap from a largely rural-agricultural economy to a manufacturing-oriented and capital-intensive one. Unfortunately, the diametric opposite occurred in Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania, and the consequent outcome was equally obverse. Henley provides persuasive evidence for his furtherance of macroeconomic stability and economic freedom as development fundamentals by drawing on the three comparative cases — although, disappointingly, with disproportionate emphasis given to Indonesia and Nigeria — and chronicling deftly the minute yet significant differences in fiscal, trade and industry policies taken in both regions that set these countries on vastly different development paths.

The final precondition in Henley's framework, the prioritizing of pro-poor/pro-rural public spending, is elaborated in Chapter 4 which advocates for the supersession of development of the rural economy over that of industry and manufacturing-oriented growth. A similar argument is extended to the comparative cases of Malaysia–Kenya, and Vietnam–Tanzania in Chapter 5. Of additional note...