Economists were too pessimistic about African growth

The literature on African growth not only ignored GDP data problems but was overly pessimistic—The Economist's 2000 'Hopeless Continent' cover and Collier's 2007 The Bottom Billion contrast with GDP series showing African economies growing rapidly since the mid-1990s, which took economists a decade and a half to notice, suggesting the governance deficit explanation has been overemphasized and revealing a knowledge problem in explaining why economies are 'not growing' when in fact they are.