Sub-Saharan Africa

Countriesregion

For most African countries the regional books are the country literature, so this is the entry to read first. It spans the resource-extraction deal machinery, the operating-company view and the reliability of the data itself.

7 books

Start here

  1. The Fate of AfricaMartin Meredith, 2004
  2. The Bottom BillionPaul Collier, 2007
  3. The Looting MachineTom Burgis, 2015

Books 7

The Fate of Africa
T2 The Fate of Africa
Martin Meredith · 2004 · The standard post-independence narrative; the background every other book assumes.
Open Library
The Bottom Billion
T2 The Bottom Billion
Paul Collier · 2007 · The four traps framework; the most cited analytic account of why growth fails to start.
Open Library
The Looting Machine
T2 The Looting Machine
Tom Burgis · 2015 · How resource deals are actually structured, from Angola to Guinea; essential on counterparty risk.
Open Library
The Golden Trade of the Moors
T3 The Golden Trade of the Moors
E. W. Bovill · 1958 · Trans-Saharan gold and salt trade; the medieval West African economy
Open Library
Paul Graham
Dead Aid
T3 Dead Aid
Dambisa Moyo · 2009 · Polemical, but the case for bond-market financing over aid is argued in investor terms.
Open Library
Poor Numbers
T3 Poor Numbers
Morten Jerven · 2013 · African GDP and growth statistics are far weaker than they look; read before modelling anything.
Open Library
Bill Gates
Africa's Business Revolution
T3 Africa's Business Revolution
Acha Leke, Mutsa Chironga, Georges Desvaux · 2018 · The rare book about companies rather than governments: who is profitable and at what scale.
Open Library