Description:
Over the decades leading to the global
financial crisis, the world witnessed a deepening
integration of world economies, irrespective of a country s
geographical location on the spherical space. This process
of increasing interdependence of world economies, most
notably illustrated by the scale of financial flows and
movements of goods and services now termed globalization,
has been facilitated by research and development and
advances in technology, especially in the area of
information and communication technology. In spite of its
global nature, its expected benefits have not been uniformly
distributed, however. This paper shows that the countries
and regions that are driving the process of knowledge
creation and production of high-tech and manufactured goods,
building on frontier technology, are benefiting the most
from globalization, increasingly acting as drivers and
relegating Sub-Saharan Africa to the end-user status. In
this process, the income gap between Sub-Saharan Africa and
the globalizers has increased even more. However, the paper
also shows that raising the level of technological endowment
in Sub-Saharan Africa to that of developed countries could
go a long way to bridge Africa's output gaps and
improve its export performance in the new globalization
landscape of the post-financial crisis era.