Brother achana na longo za huko eac, these economies are really doing good. Not only in GDP but also in social and other parameters. If you look, eg, the ratio of doctor to patients, teacher to students, classroom to students, book to students, percentage of tarmac roads, corruption perception index etc in final analysis one can say these countries are not belonging to this continent. The issue of population size has neutral correlation with the economy, there are many countries with very minimal population size which are economically striving eg Burundi. Again the issue of importing goods doesn't hold water for me, coz even the giant European economy German (where am based) import a long list of goods, but still the economy is doing great.