Jeffrey Sachs: belief

Transcript context

…Geography again. Just extraordinarily difficult. It’s why I also worry about Africa’s demographic trends because obviously I think a lot about the difficulties of development. You’re mentioning some, but as hard as it is for Africa now with one billion in sub-Saharan Africa, Africa’s going to have two billion people before the middle of the century on the trajectory. It’s going to have around four billion people on the so-called medium variant fertility trajectory that the UN population division puts forward. I find sustainable development in Africa in those terms not feasible. I couldn’t answer that question, what is a viable path. When you think about the problems of development in very poor, difficult conditions as much of sub-Saharan Africa has right now, the best thing going forward is this tremendous room for catching up. That means a lot of leapfrogging technologies and the fact that there is a true, phenomenal, wonderful, powerful information revolution underway of which we’re just in the early stages. We’re still on the first slope of the S-curve in that, and that’s great. But, there are huge headwinds of which I would say demography and climate change are two, plus the traditional facts for a lot of Africa: disease, very difficult tropical environment, and 14 landlocked countries, all of which make this a very special problem. Let me give you another Dani Rodrik argument. He says that once countries get a foothold in manufacturing, their productivity levels converge pretty quickly, but in agriculture it’s much longer. You’ve probably looked at those same numbers. It at least seems true to me. Do you agree with this, and do you think it’s a major problem facing Africa? If so, what should they do about it?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.