Productivity Growth and Convergence in Asian and African Agriculture

A number of studies have been done to compare economic performance in Asia and Africa. These include the works of Stein (1994) on industrialisation, Chibber and Leechor (1995) on overall development experience and Harrold et al. (1996) on trade and industrialisation. Given the outstanding success in the economic growth of East and South-East Asian countries such as Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, there has been a widespread belief that Asia has achieved much better economic development than Africa, and therefore Africa should try to learn from Asia’s experience. Most of the previous studies have focused extensively on the performance of aggregate economies. The question arises as to whether Asia has also achieved better performance at the sectoral level. This study fills this gap by comparing productivity in the agricultural sector: first, measuring and comparing total factor productivity (TFP) growth in Asian and African agriculture over the last three decades; and secondly investigating the behaviour of the agricultural productivity growth rate over time, focusing on the question of convergence.