Harry Verhoeven in Foreign Affairs:
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...Between 2001 and 2012–13, Ethiopia’s economy grew more than seven percent per year on average. It was the only African country to move at a pace comparable to the East Asian tigers—and to do so without a hydrocarbons boom or a huge mining sector. The economic miracle resulted in real pro-poor growth, lifting millions of people out of the vicious cycle of poverty, hunger, and poor health. While the country’s population soared from roughly 40 million in the 1980s to nearly 100 million today, it achieved the 2000–15 Millennium Development Goals for child mortality and is likely to also meet them for combating HIV/AIDS and rolling back malaria. Ethiopia is also making giant strides tackling income volatility and illiteracy. And, with sequential bumper harvests of Ethiopia’s staple crop, tef (a cereal similar to millet), millions of smallholder farmers might well be able to escape the productivity traps that historically have kept them in abject poverty.
Ethiopia’s economic resurgence has underwritten an ambitious state-building project by the governing Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) that differs resoundingly from Washington Consensus recipes of electoral democracy and laissez-faire economics. Ethiopia has become the prime example of what my colleagues and I have termed “Africa’s illiberal state-builders.” In the aftermath of two decades of war, the EPRDF established a durable political order that seeks autonomy from internal and external threats, builds functional institutions, and establishes hegemonic control over the political economy. The economy’s commanding heights are in the hands of state-owned enterprises and business elites closely wedded to the EPRDF project. In the last parliamentary election, the EPRDF and its allies won all but two of 547 available seats. The party is emphatically statist when it comes to development, and it relies on a relatively narrow social base, but its organization is extraordinary in political and coercive terms. The latter is derived from decades of armed struggle and close cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which advised the EPRDF in its drive to recruit five million new members between 2005 and 2010 and has developed deep party-to-party ties. There is no state in Africa where talk of a “China Model” sounds more substantive than in Ethiopia under EPRDF rule