Abstract
In this paper, we define African climbing countries as those that have realised increased annualized economic growth since reaching a per capita GDP of US $500. We identified 16 countries out of 47 as climbing countries, but five of them stood out, with an average growth of 4%. We showed that climbing countries experienced a positive structural transformation and were still in the process of industrialising, whereas non-climbing countries experienced premature deindustrialisation. We then used Bayesian model averaging to show that growth among climbing countries occurred because of favourable trade policies and good use of natural resources.
