Challenges to and Opportunities for Structural Transformation: Africa’s Service Sector

The growing importance of services in the growth process of Africa has been a subject of considerable policy debate in the last decade. At first, the discussion was narrowly centered on the expansion of the services sector, but more recently, the focus has no longer been about whether the services sector is outgrowing other sectors in Africa but rather how sustainable the growth of the services sector is and whether it can contribute to the overall economic development of African countries (Young, 2012; McMillan and Harttgen, 2014; Rodrik, 2014a).