Across time, rapid growth episodes in the region were typically experienced during the _Africa Rising_ period, after countries in the region emerged from deep recessions in the 1980s and 1990s. Across sectors, industrial activity tends to grow at a faster pace during miracle episodes, although services can also play a key role. Unlike other regions, agriculture still plays an important role in Africa and could also drive miracle episodes, especially through productivity improvement, such as in Mozambique and Ethiopia. It should be noted that a balanced growth across all sectors –with interlinkages and positive externalities among them– tends to be most sustainable. In the African continent, Botswana, Mauritius, and Ethiopia are three extraordinary cases whose growth has been sustained for decades and is still continuing today. At the end of this section, we analyze these three economies, focusing on their commonalities at the onset of their growth miracles, to learn what might have triggered the period of very rapid growth. We find that all these miracle episodes happens when the country has great leadership committed to economic development, diversifies into new industries beyond a single traditional sector, expands its markets globally, and invests for the future.

# **4.1 Uncovering and Understanding the Growth Miracles**

The underperformance of economic growth in the region hides several exceptional episodes of sustained growth over long periods—which we denote here as growth miracles. More specifically, we identified these growth miracles as those episodes where real GDP per capita grew over 2 percent continuously for over a decade.<sup>15</sup> Our methodology follows the spirit of the work from Hausmann, Pritchett and Rodrik (2005), although we focus on identifying sustained rather than accelerated growth. To avoid arbitrary thresholds, we also conducted sensitivity analysis by modifying the threshold rate of growth per capita and duration that identify these miracle episodes; namely, growth per capita above 3% for over 8 years and above 3.5% for over 7 years. All identification criteria identified around one in five countries in the world that have experienced such an event in the past six decades, suggesting these growth miracles are indeed exceptional while also attainable. **Table 3** presents the list of countries for which we were able to identify a growth miracle under each criterion. Among 35 countries that are identified by all three criteria, approximately one in nine is located in Sub-Saharan Africa. Meanwhile, a total of 13 Sub-Saharan African countries are identified by at least one of the three criteria. East Asia & Pacific and Europe & Central Asia have witnessed more miracle episodes.

To obtain a more comprehensive understanding of how different regions perform when it comes to “growth miracles”, we computed a series of metrics, including duration, depth, and likelihood of these episodes using our baseline criterion, _i.e._ , above 2% growth rate for over a decade ( **Table 4** ). Results show that SubSaharan African countries are capable of sustaining growth, and “growth miracles” in the region perform as well as, if not better than, those in other regions. Among “miracle countries” (columns c to g), SubSaharan Africa actually outperforms most other regions on the duration of the miracle episode, the annual growth rate during the miracle episode, and the accumulated expansion during the episode. The average duration of growth miracles is nearly 16 years across Sub-Saharan African miracle countries, which is lower only than that of the East Asia and the Pacific region (22.6 years). On average, GDP per capita at the end of the miracle episode is on average sixfold of their initial level among the identified Sub-Saharan African countries. Where the region falls short is the likelihood of such miracle episode. Only 6.4% of country-year units in the region fall into a miracle episode, compared with 10.2% in the rest of developing countries. These results suggest that a Sub-Saharan African country could embark on a sustained growth trajectory, 15 Berg et al. (2012) and Arizala et al. (2017) define growth spells as those periods characterized by a growth surge that is followed by a prolonged period of at least 2 percent average per capita income growth.