The world’s fastest-growing continent
世界上发展最快的大陆
Pride in Africa’s achievements should be coupled with the determination to make even faster progress
非洲取得成功获得的自豪感，应该和他们的决心结合起来获得更快的发展
Mar 2nd 2013 | From the print edition
CELEBRATIONS are in order on the poorest continent. Never in the half-century since it won independence from the colonial powers has Africa been in such good shape. Its economy is flourishing. Most countries are at peace. Ever fewer children bear arms and record numbers go to school. Mobile phones are as ubiquitous as they are in India and, in the worst-affected countries, HIV infections have fallen by up to three-quarters. Life expectancy rose by a tenth in the past decade and foreign direct investment has tripled. Consumer spending will almost double in the next ten years; the number of countries with average incomes above $1,000 per person a year will grow from less than half of Africa’s 55 states to three-quarters.
这块世界上最为贫穷的大陆一片欣欣向荣。从殖民统治赢得独立后的半个世纪里，非洲从未有过这么好的局面。大部分非洲国家处于和平状态。携带武器的孩子越来越少，学生人数创历史新高。和印度一样，手机已屡见不鲜，在艾滋病毒最严重的国家，感染人数已减少了近3/4。人们的平均寿命在过去十年里增加了十分之一，外商直接投资额翻了三番。人们的消费在未来十年翻倍，在55个非洲国家中，人均年收入达一千美元的国家数量从原来的不足一半达到四分之三。
Africans deserve the credit. Western aid agencies, Chinese mining companies and UN peacekeepers have done their bit, but the continent’s main saviours are its own people. They are embracing modern technology, voting in ever more elections and pressing their leaders to do better. A sense of hope abounds. Africans rightly take pride in conferences packed with Western bankers keen to invest in their capital markets (see article). Within the next few months MasterCard will have issued South Africans with 10m debit cards. Even the continent’s politicians are doing a bit better, especially in economic management and striking peace deals. Average GDP growth is humming along, at about 6%. Governance is improving: our correspondent visited 23 countries to research this week’s special report and was not once asked for a bribe—inconceivable only ten years ago.
非洲人们当之无愧。西方援助机构，中国矿业公司以及联合国维和部队都尽全力帮助非洲，但是非洲人民才是这片大陆的主要救世主。他们学习现代技术，投票参与比以往更多的选举，望他们的领导者有更好的作为。每个人心中都充满了希望，非洲人民引以为自豪的是：参与会议的西方银行家热衷于投资非洲金融市场（详见文章）。在接下来的几个月里，万事达卡公司将向南非人民发行一千万张借记卡。连非洲政治家的处事能力也更加给力，特别是在经济管理和达成和平协议方面。年均国内生产总值也一路高歌，增长率约为6%。国家治理能力也在不断的改善：为了调查本周的特别报道，我们的记者在23个非洲国家进行了采访，但是并没有人要求受贿—这在十年前实属罕见。
This is a welcome transformation, but it is still incomplete. The danger is that Africa settles for today’s pace of change. Only if Africans raise their ambitions still further will they reach their full potential. They need to take on the difficult jobs of building infrastructure, rooting out corruption and clearing the tangle of government regulation that is still holding them back. And they should hurry.
这是一个可喜的变化，但是仍有待完善。非洲满足现在的转变步伐–这才是危险所在。只要非洲人民继续拥有雄心壮志，他们就能充分发挥自己的潜力。他们需要进行一些困难的工作，如基础设施建设，铲除腐败，清除仍然拖后腿的政府监管。他们应该抓紧时间。
Don’t dawdle
别游手好闲
One reason is that so much more remains to be done. Poverty may have become less visible in Africa’s capitals but it remains widespread. The battle against hunger has not been won. The spread of wealth is uneven and winners from today’s boom all too often rush to fortify their gilded positions inside guarded compounds. The financiers who suggest that Africa could soon rival Asia have let their imaginations run riot. Whereas one is the workshop of the world, the other almost exclusively exports what grows in fields or is dug out from below them.
其中一个原因是：还有更多的事情有待完成。贫穷的情况在非洲国家的首都日益少见,但还是广泛存在。抗饥饿之路任道重远，财富分布不均，当今繁荣经济的受益者常常急于巩固他们在利益集团下“镀金地位”。那些认为非洲不久能与亚洲相抗衡的金融家已大肆吹嘘他们的幻想。然而，一个是世界工厂，一个却几乎只能出口土里长的或地下挖的原材料。
About a third of Africa’s GDP growth comes from commodities. This will not last. Today’s prices are near record highs and commodity markets have a habit of collapsing. Furthermore, recent gains in agricultural commodities may be undermined by climate change. Even now, savannahs are drying out, water tables are dropping and rains either failing or becoming more irregular. One in five Africans will be directly affected by 2020. Even as their continent prospers, many of them will continue to depend on agriculture and there is little they can do about the threats to the world’s environment.
大约三分之一的非洲国内生产总值增长率得益于商品。这种状况也不会持续太久。目前商品价格已近历史新高，商品市场定时陷入崩溃状态。而且，最近农产品的收益可能受到环境变化的影响。尽管这样，非洲热带大草原天气日益干燥，地下水位下降，降水要么趋少，要么不定时。2020年将有五分之一的非洲人直接受到影响。就算非洲大陆经济繁荣，许多人仍得继续依赖农业，对世界环境的威胁，他们已无能为力。
Another reason to push ahead is that Africa’s hard-won victories are vulnerable to relapses. Kenya is a model for other countries in east Africa but the campaign for elections on March 4th has been marred by violence (see article). New scourges—like Islamist extremism in the Sahara—could yet sow instability.
促进非洲发展的另一原因是：非洲来之不易的胜利随时都有溃败的危险。肯尼亚是其他东非国家的榜样，但是3月4号的总统竞选活动受到暴力事件的破坏（详见文章）。新的灾难—如撒哈拉地区的伊斯兰极端主义—可能已造成局势动荡。
And Africa must make the most of two transitions it is now going through. The move from the countryside to cities offers the chance of a one-off boost to productivity both on the farm and in the slums. If African states bungle this, they will create a dangerous unemployed urban class. At the same time, though Africa’s population is still growing rapidly—it will double to 2 billion by 2050—families there are becoming smaller. This promises a “demographic dividend”, as the number of workers relative to children and the elderly increases. The continent must make use of this bulge of labour, and the savings it produces, for development. If they squander it, Africans will grow old before they grow rich.
非洲必须充分利用正在经历的两个转变。农村到城市的人口流动为农场和贫民窟提供了一次性提高生产率的机会。如果非洲国家搞砸了话，就会形成城市失业族，数目惊人。与此同时，虽然非洲人口数量仍在继续增加—-到2050，人口将增加一倍至20亿—–家庭规模日趋变小。当劳动人口数量的增长率高于儿童和老年人口增长率，即为“人口红利（注释1）”。非洲必须利用好增长的劳动力以及创造的财富来取得发展。如果把这个都白白浪费的话，非洲人们就未富先老了。
Break down your borders
冲破边界
Africa’s citizens are already striving to become more productive. Farmers have started using hand-held gadgets to gain access to weather reports. Slums too are teeming with technology. The internet is changing the way the continent does business. In Kenya a third of GDP flows through a mobile money-transfer system set up by a private telecoms company.
非洲人民已在不断的提高自己的劳动能力。农民开始利用小型手持工具获取天气预报。贫民窟的人们也都使用技术。互联网正在改变非洲经商的方式。在肯尼亚，三分之一的国内生产总值通过一家私营电信公司建立的移动转账系统进行资金流动。
But Africa’s entrepreneurs are often stymied by the state. The bottom third countries in the World Bank’s ease-of-business ranking are almost all in Africa. Their people could easily have better lives; abundant capital and technology offer big opportunities. The infrastructure is improving—only 5% of the 15,800 miles travelled for our special report was on unpaved roads—but the power grid is a disaster. On the whole, government officials should focus less on building things than getting out of the way. Useless regulations have created bottlenecks. East Africa’s main port in Mombasa is gummed up and land borders across the continent hold back lorries for days. Restrictions on employing migrants and on land ownership prevent businesses from expanding. Bureaucrats and customs officers inflate the cost of getting anything done. Shipping a car from China to Tanzania costs $4,000, but getting it from there to nearby Uganda can cost another $5,000.
但是非洲企业家创业经常受到国家的阻碍。在世界银行的商业环境宽松排行中，排名最后三分之一的国家几乎都是来自非洲。这些国家的人们能轻松的过上好的生活，雄厚的资本以及技术提供了许多巨大的机会。基础设施得到不断的改善—我们在这次特别报道之行中共行了15800英里，只有5%的路面是崎岖不平的—但是电网是一个问题。总的来说，政府官员应该把心思多放在解决问题上，而不是大兴国土建设。一些没有实际意义的调控措施形成了造成了的“瓶颈”。位于蒙巴萨岛的东非重要港口现是乱七八糟，运输车辆通过各国边界线时得耗些时日。对移民雇员以及土地所有权的限制使商业很难开展起来。政府官员及海关人员常使人们办事的成本增加。从中国海运一辆汽车至坦桑尼亚需花费4000美元，但是从坦桑尼亚到附近的乌干达有得花费5000美元。
If aspiring Africa wants a new dream, it should be creating a common market from the Med to the Cape. That would be a boon to trade, enterprise and manufacturing: it would also get rid of much of the petty corruption and save lives. A recent World Bank report pointed out that Africa could produce enough food to feed itself; alas, too few subsistence farmers get a chance to sell their produce (and usually get less than 20% of the market price). Why not rekindle pan-Africanism by opening borders drawn in London and Paris? Africa needs a reborn liberation movement—except this time the aim is to free Africans from civil servants rather than colonial masters.
如果有抱负的非洲想要一个新的未来，它应该建立一个囊括地中海至开普敦区域的共同市场。这将给贸易，企业以及制造业带来福音，剔除许多轻微的腐败行为以及拯救生命。世界银行最近发布的报道指出，非洲的粮食已实现自给自足。可是，很少有生计农民能够卖出自己的农产品（产品价格常常低于20%的市场价格）。为什么不开放与英国和法国交界的边境来重燃泛非主义（注释2）呢？非洲需要进行一场解放运动来获得重生，但是这次目标将非洲人民从国家官员而非殖民者统治者桎梏中解放出来。
注释1：人口红利：是指一个国家的劳动年龄人口占总人口比重较大，抚养率比较低，为经经济发展创造了有利的人口条件，整个国家的经济成高储蓄、高投资和高增长的局面。
注释2：泛非主义：是全世界黑种人反对种族歧视和殖民统治的一个声势浩大的民族主义思潮。早在帝国主义忙于重新瓜分殖民地的同时，受民族自决口号影响的泛非主义思潮及其表现形式泛非运动就已兴起，其领袖是美国黑人学者杜波依斯。首次泛非大会于1900年在伦敦举行，至1974年第六届达累斯萨拉姆大会，先后召开六次大会，影响遍及非洲，加勒比，欧洲和美洲。泛非主义不但强调民族解放，也强调世界上无论哪里的非洲人后裔，都有共同的利害关系并需要互助合作。