5. A Qualitative Analysis of Africa–West Economic Relations

Africa and the West have had intense political and economic relations since the seventh century BC, throughout institutional arrangements as different as trading posts, colonial treaties and relations among sovereign nations standing on (a formally) equal footing. While on the one side such an old, comprehensive, multi-layered relationship cannot simply be interpreted via economic and trade exchanges, interests of an economic nature have always been at the centre of the West’s quest for opening trading routes and exerting political influence. To understand and interpret these interests, Raudino disentangles the economic mechanisms behind the statistics portrayed in the “Quantitative Assessment of Africa’s International Economic Relations”. By reviewing key interests among American and European constituencies influencing foreign relations with Africa and by leveraging historical readings of economic practices as resulting from the review in “The Praxis of Economic Growth: Lessons from History”, Raudino shows how perfectly rational it is for Western donor agencies to avoid assisting Africa in undertaking the same developmental paths they have walked themselves, particularly by setting up productive capacity aimed at exporting goods and services in increasingly higher-capital- and technology-intensive sectors.