Joe Studwell: evaluation

Transcript context

…But say there’re transportation costs internally, energy costs, political order uncertainty. Where’s the place where people really want to put all these manufacturing firms? On energy costs — these have traditionally been very high in Africa because there has not been the investment in energy, but with the development of massively reduced cost for solar and wind, actually, things look quite good, and the development of geothermal as well. There’s no reason that I can see why African countries aren’t going to be able to produce very cheap electricity, which as you say, is a critical input for a manufacturing economy. In fact, we’ve seen that in Ethiopia already. Ethiopia has electricity at a fraction of the cost of other African countries because they set out with an aggressive industrial policy to make that happen. A lot of it’s through hydro, because of course they are one of the great water towers of Africa, but also wind and solar are being built out as well, and geothermal. So, I think that there’s no reason why Africa can’t get towards cheap industrial electricity. And in terms of road connections, an awful lot of road connections have been built. Africa’s not great, but road density has been, actually, a significant success story, not only of the last 20 years, but of the last 50 years. If you go somewhere like Rwanda, you’re blown away by the quality of the roads. And of course, since 2013, Belt and Road, the Chinese have put in $150 billion. But a lot of that is for their mining, right? It doesn’t necessarily help diversification.…

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