StatsGuru:Tracking the African continent's key numbers

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The India-Africa summit drew attention to one of the world's most economically dynamic regions. As Table 1 shows, the continent as a whole has been growing at around or over four per cent a year for most of the past decade.

Furthermore, per-capita growth, as Table 2 shows, has also been looking up. And while gross capital formation stopped rising after the 2008 global financial crisis, it looks to be heading back to its pre-crisis peak, as Table 3 suggests.

Which sub-Saharan countries have done well, and which poorly? As Table 4 shows, some resource-rich countries (Mozambique, Sierra Leone) have beaten the "resource curse". Interestingly, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia, among the best performers, have both dealt with regional strife recently. Among the poorest performers in sub-Saharan Africa is South Africa, which in other ways leads African indicators.

In terms of investment, several countries have very high gross capital formation rates, as Table 5 reveals - but the poor performers include regional heavyweight and oil exporter Nigeria as well as Zimbabwe, suffering under decades of Robert Mugabe's misrule.

Many of the countries heavily investing also have very high current account deficits - such as, for example, Mozambique, as shown in Table 6. But Zimbabwe is among the offenders here as well. Oil and diamond exporters like Nigeria and Botswana feature on the list of the top five sub-Saharan countries in terms of a positive current account.