Morten Jerven
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 169747 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Morten Jerven |
| PRENOMES | Morten |
| SOBRENOME | Jerven |
| ASSINATURA | JERVEN M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Simon Fraser University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7302-3575 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 34 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 145 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 34 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2010 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
The Growth, Inequality, and Poverty Nexus
This paper analyses the growth-inequality-poverty nexus in Tanzania. We provide a unique long-term study covering six decades of Tanzanian independence and disentangle the competing narratives concerning growth, inequality, and poverty in the country. We do this by carefully assessing the existing–and at times contradictory–data on growth, inequality, and poverty and by introducing the inequality extraction ratio, which has so far received little…
On the persistence of persistence
An influential strand of literature within economics and economic history called ‘persistence studies’ argues that low material living standards in African countries today were determined by institutional choices made in the past. However, the lack of consistent annual data on GDP per capita or institutional variables has meant that this literature has been largely silent as to whether their proposed relationships hold throughout the period it st…
The history of hunger
The Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU) is one of the most central indicators informing the international development agenda. Reported annually by the Rome-based UN agencies in their flagship report The State of Food Insecurity in the World, it is generally considered an authoritative statistic on world hunger. Based on archival research, this article chronicles and analyzes the development of its statistical model and the political and historic…
Measuring the end of hunger
Ending world hunger remains one of the central global challenges, but the question of how to measure and define the problem is politically charged. This article chronicles and analyses the indicator selection process for SDG 2.1, focusing in particular on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) indicator. Despite alleged efforts to separate political and technical aspects in the indicator selection process we find that they were entangled fro…
The Fiscal State in Africa
What is the level of state capacity in developing countries today, and what have been its drivers over the past century? We construct a comprehensive new data set of tax and revenue collection for forty-six African polities from 1900 to 2015. Our data show that polities in Africa have been characterized by strong growth in fiscal capacity on average, but that substantial heterogeneity exists. The empirical analysis reveals that canonical state-bu…
Contested Numbers
This article reconstructs the controversies following the release of the figures from Nigeria's 1963 population census. As the basis for the allocation of seats in the federal parliament and for the distribution of resources, the census is a valuable entry point into postcolonial Nigeria's political culture. After presenting an overview of how the Africanist literature has conceptualized the politics of population counting, the article analyses t…
Poor Numbers
One of the most urgent challenges in African economic development is to devise a strategy for improving statistical capacity. Reliable statistics, including estimates of economic growth rates and per-capita income, are basic to the operation of governments in developing countries and vital to nongovernmental organizations and other entities that provide financial aid to them. Rich countries and international financial institutions such as the Wor…
Controversy, Facts and Assumptions
This article contributes to the debates surrounding “New African Economic History” by exploring the feasibility of constructing a time series of economic growth in Nigeria spanning the whole twentieth century. Currently most datasets for African economies only go back to 1960. The sources for their creation exist, but these valuable colonial data remain underutilized. This is an exploratory paper in a project aiming to create measures of economic…
The History of African Poverty by Numbers
Poverty has a long history in Africa. Yet, the most conventional and influential history of African poverty is a very short one. As told by the World Bank, the history of poverty starts in the 1980s with the first Living Standard Measurement Study. This history of poverty by numbers is also a very narrow one. There is a disconnect between the theoretical and historical underpinnings of how academics understand and define poverty in Africa, and ho…
Discrepancies
Production Economics, Research Methods/Statistical Methods
How Much Will a Data Revolution in Development Cost
The UN High Level Panel has called for a data revolution. The world’s population should be counted, measured, weighed, and evaluated. This information should be collected, compiled, aggregated, and presented in such a form that it can usefully inform policy-makers and citizens in aggregated forms, and disaggregated according to region, village, gender, and population group. It is tempting to think that having more and better information will impr…
Research Note
We know less about growth and poverty based on numbers in African economies than we would like to think. Numbers are soft, and data availability is sparse, sporadic, and uneven. For researchers and data users, whether engaged in inferential or descriptive statistics, the message is that studying Africa by numbers can be misleading. This research note surveys the knowledge gap and provides guidance on how to and how not to study Africa by numbers.
GDP Revisions and Updating Statistical Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa
The quality of economic statistics in Africa has been likened to a statistical tragedy. Currently many statistical systems in Africa are being updated. This report from the statistical offices in Nigeria, Liberia and Zimbabwe documents that base year, data and methods used to generate GDP estimates currently date from 1990, 1992 and 1994. There is a growing need for macroeconomic statistics, but a rebasing of GDP estimates is costly and time cons…
Statistical Tragedy in Africa? Evaluating the Data Base for African Economic Development
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
African growth miracle or statistical tragedy? Interpreting trends in the data over the past two decades
This paper reviews the current problems of national accounting in Sub-Saharan Africa. With the current uneven application of methods and availability of data, any ranking of countries according to gross domestic product levels is misleading. It is increasingly acknowledged that the problems associated with national accounts in Africa may have caused growth to be underestimated, and there are concerns that gross domestic product does not capture o…
The Cambridge History of Capitalism
The first volume of The Cambridge History of Capitalism provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of capitalism from its earliest beginnings. Starting with its distant origins in ancient Babylon, successive chapters trace progression up to the 'Promised Land' of capitalism in America. Adopting a wide geographical coverage and comparative perspective, the international team of authors discuss the contributions of Greek, Roman, and Asian ci…
Measuring Economic Progress in the African Context
This chapter examines the debates over the measurement of economic progress in African countries in the twentieth century, paying particular attention to national accounting and the measurement of gross domestic product per capita and economic growth. It considers how African economic progress has been measured from colonial times to the pioneering national account initiatives in the 1950s, economic liberalization and the “discovery” of the infor…
Measuring African development
The chief economist for the World Bank's Africa region, Shanta Devarajan, delivered a devastating assessment of the capacity of African states to measure development in his 2013 article “Africa's 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 developme…
A WestAfrican experiment
There has been a recent surge in research on long-termAfrican development. For this research agenda to be fruitful and its theories tested, it is crucial to have consistent estimates of economic change. However, there is a lack of reliable time series data for the colonial period inSub-SaharanAfrica. This article contributes new time series data for theGoldCoast andGhana between 1890 and 2010 and in particular a newGDPtime series forGhana for the…
Writing history backwards or sideways
This article aims to make an empirical and theoretical contribution towards the creation of a continent-wide dataset on African population extending into the pre-1950 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 un…
The Political Economy of Agricultural Statistics and Input Subsidies
The political economy of agricultural policies - why certain interventions may be preferred by political leaders rather than others - is well recognized. This paper explores a perspective that has previously been neglected: the political economy of the agricultural statistics. In developing economies, the data on agricultural production are weak. Because these data are assembled using competing methods and assumptions, the final series are subjec…
Reading economics
What is the role of the economics discipline in teaching and studying international development today? This paper draws upon experiences of teaching and reading economics with students in interdisciplinary international development studies. The main conclusion is that economic literacy is a key ingredient in development studies. This paper discusses different interpretations of what economic literacy may entail and why this literacy is important.…
Briefing
On 5 November 2010, Ghana Statistical Services announced that it was revising the GDP estimates upwards by over 60 percent, suggesting that in previous GDP estimates economic activities worth about US$13 billion had been missed. After the revision a range of new activities were accounted for, and as a result Ghana was suddenly upgraded from a low-income country to a lower-middle-income country. In the fall of 2011 Nigeria also announced a forthco…
Poor Numbers - How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do About It (Uzuazo Etemire)
VRÜ Verfassung und Recht in Übersee , Seite 336 - 340
Why nations fail
Writing history backwards or sideways
This article aims to make an empirical and theoretical contribution towards the creation of a continent-wide dataset on African population extending into the pre-1950 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 un…
Poor Numbers - How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do About It (Uzuazo Etemire)
VRÜ Verfassung und Recht in Übersee , Seite 336 - 340
An unlevel playing field
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 historic…
African Growth Recurring
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 Africa's underdevelopment and towa…
The relativity of poverty and income
It has been argued that the fundamental cause of Africa’s current relative poverty is a lack of pro-growth institutions deriving either from the colonial system, the period of slavery, or from particular geographic or population characteristics. This article takes a fresh look at estimates of African country incomes. It subjects the available datasets to tests of accuracy, reliability, and volatility, and finds that there is very little to explai…
Briefing
On 5 November 2010, Ghana Statistical Services announced that it was revising the GDP estimates upwards by over 60 percent, suggesting that in previous GDP estimates economic activities worth about US$13 billion had been missed. After the revision a range of new activities were accounted for, and as a result Ghana was suddenly upgraded from a low-income country to a lower-middle-income country. In the fall of 2011 Nigeria also announced a forthco…
How Much Will a Data Revolution in Development Cost
The UN High Level Panel has called for a data revolution. The world’s population should be counted, measured, weighed, and evaluated. This information should be collected, compiled, aggregated, and presented in such a form that it can usefully inform policy-makers and citizens in aggregated forms, and disaggregated according to region, village, gender, and population group. It is tempting to think that having more and better information will impr…
The History of African Poverty by Numbers
Poverty has a long history in Africa. Yet, the most conventional and influential history of African poverty is a very short one. As told by the World Bank, the history of poverty starts in the 1980s with the first Living Standard Measurement Study. This history of poverty by numbers is also a very narrow one. There is a disconnect between the theoretical and historical underpinnings of how academics understand and define poverty in Africa, and ho…
Measuring African development
The chief economist for the World Bank's Africa region, Shanta Devarajan, delivered a devastating assessment of the capacity of African states to measure development in his 2013 article “Africa's 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 developme…
A WestAfrican experiment
There has been a recent surge in research on long-termAfrican development. For this research agenda to be fruitful and its theories tested, it is crucial to have consistent estimates of economic change. However, there is a lack of reliable time series data for the colonial period inSub-SaharanAfrica. This article contributes new time series data for theGoldCoast andGhana between 1890 and 2010 and in particular a newGDPtime series forGhana for the…
Users and producers of African income
This article traces how African incomes have been measured through history, and shows that there has been a conflict of aims between producers and users of national income estimates. Politicians and international organizations seek income measures that reflect current political and economic priorities and achievements. Thus the importance given to markets, the state, and peasants in the estimates varies through time and space. Meanwhile statistic…
Accounting for the African Growth Miracle
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 …
Research Note
We know less about growth and poverty based on numbers in African economies than we would like to think. Numbers are soft, and data availability is sparse, sporadic, and uneven. For researchers and data users, whether engaged in inferential or descriptive statistics, the message is that studying Africa by numbers can be misleading. This research note surveys the knowledge gap and provides guidance on how to and how not to study Africa by numbers.
The Political Economy of Agricultural Statistics and Input Subsidies
The political economy of agricultural policies - why certain interventions may be preferred by political leaders rather than others - is well recognized. This paper explores a perspective that has previously been neglected: the political economy of the agricultural statistics. In developing economies, the data on agricultural production are weak. Because these data are assembled using competing methods and assumptions, the final series are subjec…
Measuring the end of hunger
Ending world hunger remains one of the central global challenges, but the question of how to measure and define the problem is politically charged. This article chronicles and analyses the indicator selection process for SDG 2.1, focusing in particular on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) indicator. Despite alleged efforts to separate political and technical aspects in the indicator selection process we find that they were entangled fro…
The Fiscal State in Africa
What is the level of state capacity in developing countries today, and what have been its drivers over the past century? We construct a comprehensive new data set of tax and revenue collection for forty-six African polities from 1900 to 2015. Our data show that polities in Africa have been characterized by strong growth in fiscal capacity on average, but that substantial heterogeneity exists. The empirical analysis reveals that canonical state-bu…
Revisiting the consensus on Kenyan economic growth, 1964-95
For a long time Kenya was the African exception – a country that embraced a capitalist path to development in the midst of widespread state-led development. More recently it has been used as one of many examples of neopatrimonial rule in Africa, following its reputation for endemic corruption and its failure to successfully embrace economic and political reforms. Most interpretations of Kenya's economic development record rest heavily on the evid…
Contested Numbers
This article reconstructs the controversies following the release of the figures from Nigeria's 1963 population census. As the basis for the allocation of seats in the federal parliament and for the distribution of resources, the census is a valuable entry point into postcolonial Nigeria's political culture. After presenting an overview of how the Africanist literature has conceptualized the politics of population counting, the article analyses t…
Why nations fail
Un demi-siècle de fictions de croissance en Afrique
Cet article interroge le phénomène du marché informel du médicament qui prospère dans les pays francophones d’Afrique de l’Ouest. Les raisons de son développement sont analysées à partir d’une rétrospective, depuis l’époque coloniale, de la mise en place des circuits de distribution du médicament au Bénin, pays qui constitue ici une étude de cas. Le marché informel du médicament met en évidence, dès son émergence, les dysfonctionnements des systè…
Social Capital as a Determinant of Economic Growth in Africa
The empirical growth literature evaluating economic performance in sub-Saharan Africa in the post-independence years have been finding that lack of social capital explains large parts of the relative growth shortfall in African economies. This emphasis is in tune with the recent generally inoreased focus on social capital across different social science disciplines. In this article, these findings will be examined and critiqued from an African ec…
Random Growth in Africa? Lessons from an Evaluation of the Growth Evidence on Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, 1965–1995
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. …
African Growth Recurring
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 Africa's underdevelopment and towa…
The relativity of poverty and income
It has been argued that the fundamental cause of Africa’s current relative poverty is a lack of pro-growth institutions deriving either from the colonial system, the period of slavery, or from particular geographic or population characteristics. This article takes a fresh look at estimates of African country incomes. It subjects the available datasets to tests of accuracy, reliability, and volatility, and finds that there is very little to explai…
Accounting for the African Growth Miracle
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 …
Users and producers of African income
This article traces how African incomes have been measured through history, and shows that there has been a conflict of aims between producers and users of national income estimates. Politicians and international organizations seek income measures that reflect current political and economic priorities and achievements. Thus the importance given to markets, the state, and peasants in the estimates varies through time and space. Meanwhile statistic…
Revisiting the consensus on Kenyan economic growth, 1964-95
For a long time Kenya was the African exception – a country that embraced a capitalist path to development in the midst of widespread state-led development. More recently it has been used as one of many examples of neopatrimonial rule in Africa, following its reputation for endemic corruption and its failure to successfully embrace economic and political reforms. Most interpretations of Kenya's economic development record rest heavily on the evid…
Why nations fail
An unlevel playing field
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 historic…
Un demi-siècle de fictions de croissance en Afrique
Cet article interroge le phénomène du marché informel du médicament qui prospère dans les pays francophones d’Afrique de l’Ouest. Les raisons de son développement sont analysées à partir d’une rétrospective, depuis l’époque coloniale, de la mise en place des circuits de distribution du médicament au Bénin, pays qui constitue ici une étude de cas. Le marché informel du médicament met en évidence, dès son émergence, les dysfonctionnements des systè…
Reading economics
What is the role of the economics discipline in teaching and studying international development today? This paper draws upon experiences of teaching and reading economics with students in interdisciplinary international development studies. The main conclusion is that economic literacy is a key ingredient in development studies. This paper discusses different interpretations of what economic literacy may entail and why this literacy is important.…
Briefing
On 5 November 2010, Ghana Statistical Services announced that it was revising the GDP estimates upwards by over 60 percent, suggesting that in previous GDP estimates economic activities worth about US$13 billion had been missed. After the revision a range of new activities were accounted for, and as a result Ghana was suddenly upgraded from a low-income country to a lower-middle-income country. In the fall of 2011 Nigeria also announced a forthco…
Poor Numbers - How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do About It (Uzuazo Etemire)
VRÜ Verfassung und Recht in Übersee , Seite 336 - 340
African growth miracle or statistical tragedy? Interpreting trends in the data over the past two decades
This paper reviews the current problems of national accounting in Sub-Saharan Africa. With the current uneven application of methods and availability of data, any ranking of countries according to gross domestic product levels is misleading. It is increasingly acknowledged that the problems associated with national accounts in Africa may have caused growth to be underestimated, and there are concerns that gross domestic product does not capture o…
The Cambridge History of Capitalism
The first volume of The Cambridge History of Capitalism provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of capitalism from its earliest beginnings. Starting with its distant origins in ancient Babylon, successive chapters trace progression up to the 'Promised Land' of capitalism in America. Adopting a wide geographical coverage and comparative perspective, the international team of authors discuss the contributions of Greek, Roman, and Asian ci…
Measuring Economic Progress in the African Context
This chapter examines the debates over the measurement of economic progress in African countries in the twentieth century, paying particular attention to national accounting and the measurement of gross domestic product per capita and economic growth. It considers how African economic progress has been measured from colonial times to the pioneering national account initiatives in the 1950s, economic liberalization and the “discovery” of the infor…
Measuring African development
The chief economist for the World Bank's Africa region, Shanta Devarajan, delivered a devastating assessment of the capacity of African states to measure development in his 2013 article “Africa's 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 developme…
A WestAfrican experiment
There has been a recent surge in research on long-termAfrican development. For this research agenda to be fruitful and its theories tested, it is crucial to have consistent estimates of economic change. However, there is a lack of reliable time series data for the colonial period inSub-SaharanAfrica. This article contributes new time series data for theGoldCoast andGhana between 1890 and 2010 and in particular a newGDPtime series forGhana for the…
Writing history backwards or sideways
This article aims to make an empirical and theoretical contribution towards the creation of a continent-wide dataset on African population extending into the pre-1950 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 un…
The Political Economy of Agricultural Statistics and Input Subsidies
The political economy of agricultural policies - why certain interventions may be preferred by political leaders rather than others - is well recognized. This paper explores a perspective that has previously been neglected: the political economy of the agricultural statistics. In developing economies, the data on agricultural production are weak. Because these data are assembled using competing methods and assumptions, the final series are subjec…
GDP Revisions and Updating Statistical Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa
The quality of economic statistics in Africa has been likened to a statistical tragedy. Currently many statistical systems in Africa are being updated. This report from the statistical offices in Nigeria, Liberia and Zimbabwe documents that base year, data and methods used to generate GDP estimates currently date from 1990, 1992 and 1994. There is a growing need for macroeconomic statistics, but a rebasing of GDP estimates is costly and time cons…
Statistical Tragedy in Africa? Evaluating the Data Base for African Economic Development
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
Discrepancies
Production Economics, Research Methods/Statistical Methods
How Much Will a Data Revolution in Development Cost
The UN High Level Panel has called for a data revolution. The world’s population should be counted, measured, weighed, and evaluated. This information should be collected, compiled, aggregated, and presented in such a form that it can usefully inform policy-makers and citizens in aggregated forms, and disaggregated according to region, village, gender, and population group. It is tempting to think that having more and better information will impr…
Research Note
We know less about growth and poverty based on numbers in African economies than we would like to think. Numbers are soft, and data availability is sparse, sporadic, and uneven. For researchers and data users, whether engaged in inferential or descriptive statistics, the message is that studying Africa by numbers can be misleading. This research note surveys the knowledge gap and provides guidance on how to and how not to study Africa by numbers.
Economics (25 obras) · Political science (20 obras) · Development economics (15 obras) · Economic growth (15 obras) · Geography (15 obras) · Sociology (13 obras) · Culture, Economy, and Development Studies (11 obras) · Politics (10 obras) · Economic Growth and Development (8 obras) · Poverty (8 obras)