The Recent Growth Boom in Developing Economies: A Structural-Change Perspective

Developing countries have experienced an extraordinary period of economic development over the last couple of decades. Besides India and China, which registered record economic growth rates, countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America have managed to match or exceed their performance of the 1960s and first half of the 1970s. The recent downturn in the global economy has cast a dark shadow on the future of this performance, and Latin America in particular has been badly hit by the decline in commodity prices. But growth in the low-income countries of Africa has been resilient and remains high in the non-resource-dependent countries.