Africa

Why economists get it wrong

Bibliographic Data

ID6028876
AuthorsDominic Burbidge (0000-0003-3732-2049, University of Oxford, corresponding author)
Year2016
Volume115
Issue460
Pages574-575
Publication date2016-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAfrican Affairs (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0001-9909 • E-ISSN: 1468-2621
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/afraf/adw020
OpenAlexW2392450262
LanguageEN
Citations received8

In this stimulating book, Morten Jerven questions the historical focus of development economics as applied to Africa and calls for greater emphasis on the individual experiences of African countries, rather than using case studies as fodder for statistical analysis. The book builds seamlessly from earlier reflections in Poor numbers: How we are misled by African development statistics and what to do about it (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), which revealed the dire inconsistencies in economic data on sub-Saharan African economies. Africa: Why economists get it wrong takes the argument to the fields of historiography and contemporary development economics, exposing how poor data have led to a prioritization of models and ‘law-like statements’ that are ‘fundamentally ahistorical’ (pp. 3, 131). Current treatment of African history by mainstream development economists is scandalous and threatening to the very project of development economics itself. Jerven's starting salvo will be familiar to readers of his work: macroeconomists have found it profitable to explain away economic failure in the continent through resort to an African dummy variable that isolates African countries and so increases the explanatory power of global models of economic growth. In what becomes a minor history of African development economics itself, Jerven explains how the trend led to a ‘quest for the African dummy’ (p. 20) by means of identifying independent variables that reveal why growth failed to take place. In this way, Jerven splits African development economics into two generations. The first argued that bad policy caused these failures; the second that ‘initial conditions’ were to blame, such as ‘lack of state legitimacy, lack of social capital and ethnic diversity’ (p. 42). The change in approach occurred around the turn of the millennium, when the continent ceased being a target for good policies and instead became a place of scholarly innovation whereby contemporary differences could be traced to historical episodes and institutional pathology (p. 7). Neither approach appreciates the complexity of upwards and downwards trends in individual country economic growth since the 1960s. Most especially, the second generation – a view that ‘history matters’ – treats time and change on its own terms, that is in so far as historical episodes help disentangle ‘initial conditions, income levels, growth rates and causes and effects’ (p. 44). This assumes away the agency of state actors; research locates their challenges as rooted in factors outside their reach, identifying problems in terms of proxies which they have no say over and are, at best, side-effects of the role of the state (p. 114).

African studies · Applied economics · Argument (complex analysis) · Development economics · Economics · Historiography · History of Africa · Mainstream · Mainstream economics · Political science · Positive economics · Power (physics) · Sociology · Anthropology · Economic Growth and Development · Gender Studies · Law

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