China could buy every African quoted company with its foreign-exchange reserves.
Here is the source, and that is via Pablo Halkyard, who wonders: "Maybe its actually an Africa fact of the day."
Here are Greg Rehmke’s links to material on Africa and development.
Note that the top 10 banks in the world could also buy all of Africa’s quoted companies with their balance sheets see table here with 2004 data, as could the Abu Dhabi development fund, so China isn’t unique in this regard.
Hmmm… China is about twice as large as Africa (population-wise), so this fact doesn’t really surprise me.
@TGGP: Botswana in sub-Sahara Africa is doing better economically speaking. I doubt race is a very good predictor of economic succes…
And Algeria isn’t well endowned with natural resources? Please. (btw, Algeria’s unemployment rate is 15%)
African has indigenous listed firms??? (Sorry, that was my first reaction…)
JSK, you are right about Botswana. Botswana is not typical for sub-Saharan African countries. You don’t have to ascribe this to race. It could be culture. It could be the level of development the colonialist occupiers engaged in depending on whether they treated their colony as a place for them to live and settle in or simply extract resources from. Nevertheless, we do see differences between regions, including between the middle east and sub-saharan Africa. I am just questioning whether Algeria is more like the former than the latter in economic and other factors. I have seen many other people lump in North Africa with the Middle East, and I was wondering whether that should also be the case here. Unemployment rates in other middle eastern and sub-saharan african countries would be good to have for comparison.
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