ABSTRACT

Do small islands surrounding Africa represent a distinct development experience? This study constructs a socio-economic profile of eleven Atlantic and Indian Ocean islands and compares it to 48 African continental countries and 40 small rest-of-world islands. Results show African islands out-perform the mainland because they have restructured toward tourism and export manufacturing but exhibit lower socio-economic development than ROW islands. When the African island profile is broken down, the paper argues in the context of the island literature that a cluster of models are represented: four MIRAB states, three tourism dependencies, one TOURAB case, and three Balanced Diversification economies.