However, many African countries brought spending and inflation under control and began to improve the business climate. Many armed conflicts ended. Since then, growth has picked up strongly. A continent once synonymous with stagnation has grown by around five per cent annually since 2000. It is often assumed that this was just a commodity boom, but natural resources generated just a third of the growth, with the rest coming from sectors such as manufacturing, telecommunications, transportation and retail. In fact, African countries had similar growth rates regardless of whether they had
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