Morten Jerven

Comparability of GDP estimates in Sub‐Saharan Africa: The effect of Revisions in Sources and Methods Since Structural Adjustment

The unreliability of African income estimates was highlighted when Ghana announced that GDP estimates were revised upwards by 60.3 percent in November 2010. Similar revisions are to be expected in other countries. Many statistical offices are currently using outdated base years. It is argued that with the current uneven application of methods and poor availability of data, any ranking of countries according to GDP levels is misleading. The paper emphasizes the challenges for “data users” in light of these revisions. GDP data are disseminated through international organizations, but without any detailed data descriptions. It is argued that many statistical offices in Sub-Saharan Africa struggled to recover from the structural adjustment period, and the offices have not had the capacity to handle other challenges such as providing data to monitor the Millennium Development Goals. Currently, neither data users nor data producers are getting the assistance they need.

African Growth Recurring : An Economic History Perspective on African Growth Episodes, 1690-2010

ABSTRACT Africa has not suffered a chronic failure of growth. In fact, Africa has experienced recurring periods of growth, and this paper reviews some of these growth “spurts” to substantiate that claim. The immediate cause of low income in Africa is that these “spurts” have always been followed by a ‘‘bust’’. This is a significant reorientation of the central research question – away from a search for the root causes of Africas underdevelopment and towards explaining the causes and effects of growth and decline. The growth spurts are approached as local responses to a global demand for African produced commodities. In this paper, I shall argue that these supply responses involved more than a reallocation of land and labour; they entailed investment and required institutional change. It is precisely because these periods of rapid economic change and accumulation caused significant qualitative changes in how society and the economy were organized that they cannot be ignored – as they have tended to be in the search for a root cause of Africas chronic failure to achieve growth.

Writing History Backwards or Sideways: Towards a Consensus on African Population‚ 1850-2010

This article aims to make an empirical and theoretical contribution towards the creation of a continent-wide dataset on African population extending into the pre1950 era. We investigate the reliability and the validity of the current population databases with the aim of working towards a consensus on the long-term series of African total population with a reliable 1950 benchmark. The cases of Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana are explored to show the uneven coverage of census taking in colonial and post-colonial Africa and to demonstrate the need for an upward adjustment of the conventional 1950 benchmark. In addition, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of Manning’s approach of projecting population growth estimates backwards in time by adopting the available Indian census data as African ‘default growth rates’, and we propose an alternative approach by incorporating the demographic experiences of tropical land-abundant countries in South-East Asia.

Random Growth in Africa? Lessons from an Evaluation of the Growth Evidence on Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, 1965–1995

Abstract Given shortcomings in basic data collection and insufficient resources in preparing official statistics African growth data are unlikely to be very reliable. Estimates of an annual growth rate of 3 per cent may be consistent with a reality between 0 and 6 per cent growth. Although data from international databases are widely used in an expanding literature on African growth there has been no research into how serious these data inaccuracies are. This paper addresses the reliability of the available growth evidence for a selection of countries and offers concrete measures of inaccuracies. It examines the reasons for discrepancies and shows that they can be quite large.

Accounting for the African Growth Miracle: The Official Evidence – Botswana 1965–1995

Botswana has figured widely as the exceptional African growth success story and has been frequently cited in scholarship that supports the view that African and other less developed economies are capable of rapid economic growth as long as the internal institutional framework and development policies are right. A shortcoming of the literature on African economic performance to date is that it has focused on the aggregate average growth rate, and has not taken the quality of the growth evidence into consideration. This article makes use of the official growth evidence taken from the published national accounts in Botswana to establish that there is reason to doubt the accuracy of the growth evidence on Botswana. It shows how the first decade of growth in particular is seriously biased upwards. After the official evidence and the national accounting methodologies have been analysed, several revisions of the African growth miracle become necessary. The ‘policy’ accounts have largely been informed by observing the recorded aggregate growth rate and have attributed the rapid growth to stylised facts about policies and institutions. A consideration of disaggregated growth rates allows a discussion of the causal coherence of the dominant explanations of rapid growth in Botswana, in particular, and in the divergent fortunes in the developing world, in general. This article argues that the growth miracle can only directly be attributed to economic policy if ‘good policy’ is defined as the absence of very bad policies.

A Clash of Disciplines? Economists and Historians Approaching the African Past

ABSTRACT This review article examines the differences in the approaches taken by economists and historians when interpreting social and economic change in the African past. It is argued that it is a mistake to assume that one discipline has supremacy over the other, let alone monopoly, when it comes to evaluating historical causes of African poverty. One of the shortcomings of the ‘New African Economic History’ is that it has largely sidestepped the issue of data quality. In cross-disciplinary work it is generally advised that data points and observations should roughly cohere with the state of knowledge in the other disciplines. Economists do themselves a disservice if the only criteria they consider for ‘robustness’ of historical arguments are those pertaining to econometric methods.

Statistical Tragedy in Africa? Evaluating the Data Base for African Economic Development

Abstract Measurement is increasingly at the centre of debates in African economic development. Some remarkable upward revisions of GDP, which are signs of statistical systems improving, caused the declaration of a statistical tragedy in Africa. This special issue evaluates the database for African economic development with articles on the quality of the data on GDP, health and education, poverty, labour, agriculture and income distribution.

An Unlevel Playing Field : National Income Estimates and Reciprocal Comparison in Global Economic History

If we take recent income per capita estimates at face value, they imply that the average medieval European was at least five times ‘better off’ than the average Congolese today. This raises important questions regarding the meaning and applicability of national income estimates throughout time and space, and their use in the analysis of global economic history over the long term. This article asks whether national income estimates have a historical and geographical specificity that renders the ‘data’ increasingly unsuitable and misleading when assessed outside a specific time and place. Taking the concept of ‘reciprocal comparison’ as a starting point, it further questions whether national income estimates make sense in pre-and post-industrial societies, in decentralized societies, and in polities outside the temperate zone. One of the major challenges in global history is Eurocentrism. Resisting the temptation to compare the world according to the most conventional development measure might be a recommended step in overcoming this bias.

Economic Growth and Measurement Reconsidered in Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia, 1965-1995

How do we measure African economic performance? This volume studies how growth is measured in Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia and challenges commonly held beliefs of African economic performance. The volume offers a reconsideration of economic growth in Africa in three respects. First, it shows that the focus has been on average economic growth and that there has been no failure of economic growth. In particular the gains made in the 1960s and 1970s have been neglected. Second, it emphasizes that for many countries the decline in economic growth in the 1980s was overstated, as was the improvement in economic growth in the 1990s. The coverage of economic activities in GDP measures is incomplete. In the 1980s many economic activities were increasingly missed in the official records thus the decline in the 1980s was overestimated (resulting from declining coverage) and the increase in the 1990s was overestimated (resulting from increasing coverage). The third important reconsideration is that there is no clear association between economic growth and orthodox economic policies. This is counter to the mainstream interpretation, and suggests that the importance of sound economic policies has been overstated, and that the importance of the external economic conditions have been understated in the prevailing explanation of African economic performance.

Measuring African development: past and present. Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract The chief economist for the World Banks Africa region, Shanta Devarajan, delivered a devastating assessment of the capacity of African states to measure development in his 2013 article “Africas Statistical Tragedy”. Is there a “statistical tragedy” unfolding in Africa now? If so then examining the roots of the problem of provision of statistics in poor economies is certainly of great importance. This Special Issue on measuring African development in the past and in the present draws on the historical experience of colonial French West Africa, Ghana, Sudan, Mauritania and Tanzania and the more contemporary experiences of Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The authors each reflect on the changing ways statistics represent African economies and how they are used to govern them.