Why is Africa poor?

As Easterly and Levine indicate, much of Africa's plight can also be linked to macroeconomic instability. Empirical evidence suggests that Africa's large government budget deficits, underdeveloped financial markets, and black-market foreign-exchange premiums (which likely proxy for a host of deficiencies in the financial and legal system) apparently explain roughly half the growth divergence between East Asia and Africa over the past several decades. In other words, these results suggest to Easterly and Levine that growth of per capita annual income in Africa would have been about 2-1/2 percentage points a year higher had countries in Africa followed policies adopted by the East Asian economies

- Alan Greenspan