Africa's economic cheetah

Botswana is a small landlocked country in Southern Africa. Its population is just 1.5 million, 84% of its territory is desert, and only 4% of its land is arable. The GDP per capita (as per the parity of the buying force) is about 6000 $. But the economic growth for the last 30 years has been consistently higher than the average in most of the world, currently 8.2%. That makes Botswana the country with the highest sustained growth in the world. Other countries have also achieved high growth but very few were able to sustain it for 3 decades without interruption. The comparison is even more striking when you consider that the average growth of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa has been negative for most of the recent 30 years. So what happened in Botswana? Do bear with me...

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