If you are looking for some good cheer in a pretty gloomy world, consider the growing consensus among some of the world’s smartest money that the next big emerging market may be Africa.

Above all, that is great news for Africans: As we have seen across so much of Asia, economic growth has accomplished what decades of well-meaning development efforts failed to do, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. If that happens in Africa, the world will be transformed.

This case for Africa as the world’s new economic tiger is made forcefully in “The Fastest Billion: The Story Behind Africa’s Economic Revolution,” a data-packed collection of essays to be published at the end of this month and brought together under the aegis of Renaissance Capital, an investment firm with Russian roots and global ambitions.

The consensus view among many students of the global economy is that investment decisions are about choosing, in the words of Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief executive of the fund manager Pimco, “the cleanest dirty shirt”: The United States faces a fiscal cliff and political gridlock, Europe is tenuously poised between years of painfully slow growth and outright collapse, and even go-go China is slowing.

By contrast, in the view of Stephen Jennings, the Renaissance chief executive, Africa is on a tear. “It is the only region in the world where growth is accelerating,” he said by phone from Moscow. “If you strip out South Africa, the rest of the region is actually growing very, very quickly.”

Jennings says he believes Africa is following the path to economic development that has been trod in recent decades by countries like Brazil, China and India – only in Africa the transformation is happening even faster.Continue To Read