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Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong (African Arguments), by Morten Jerven
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For the first time in generations, Africa is spoken of these days with enthusiastic hope: no longer seen as a hopeless morass of poverty, the continent instead is described as “Africa Rising,” a land of enormous economic potential that is just beginning to be tapped.
With Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong, Morten Jerven offers a bracing corrective. Neither story, he shows, is accurate. In truth, most African economies have been growing rapidly since the 1990s—and, until a collapse in the ’70s and ’80s, they had been growing reliably for decades. Puncturing weak analysis that relies too much on those two lost decades, Jerven redraws our picture of Africa’s past, present, and potential.
- Sales Rank: #184067 in Books
- Published on: 2015-06-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.75" h x .50" w x 5.00" l, .55 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 176 pages
Review
"Excellent. . . . [Jerven’s] points are elegantly argued and although he delves into extremely technical economic concepts and methods, Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong is readable and easy for a nonspecialist to understand. But specialists in particular must read Jerven, and take seriously his claims." (Laura Seay and Kim Yi Dionne Washington Post)
“[Jerven] demolishes much of the best-known work by prominent economists who very clearly do get it wrong and in so doing promote a false and unfortunate impression of Africa as failed economically. . . . Everyone interested in Africa or in the great mysteries of how to understand economic growth can benefit from this excellent book. Essential.” (Choice)
"Jerven provides a very useful explanation and argument as to why Western policies or technologies cannot simply be grafted onto the current reality of Africa." (International Socialism)
“In his incisive book, Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong, Jerven provides a critical analysis of the economic development literature on Africa.”
(African Studies Quarterly)
“According to Jerven, the dominant narrative of African economic failure persists because economists ask the wrong question: they seek to explain why Africa has failed rather than show how Africa has actually performed. In fact, over the last century, many African economies have experienced episodes of both growth and decline. . . . Ultimately, Jerven concludes that although the narrative of chronic failure is a distortion, so is the ‘Africa rising’ narrative.”
(Foreign Affairs)
About the Author
Morten Jerven teaches at the School for International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He is the author of Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It.
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
An insightful book on how African economic statistics have problems and how narratives built on them are dubious
By sien
Africa : Why Economists Get it Wrong (2015) by Morten Jerven is a very interesting book on how economists have misused dubious statistics on Africa and erroneously constructed a narrative on how African development has failed. Books on Africa such as Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion and William Easterly's The Elusive Quest for Growth are built on very shaky foundations according to Jerven.
Jerven is an economic historian with a PhD from the LSE and wrote the highly acclaimed book Wrong Numbers that seems to cover much of the ground that this book does.
Jerven describes how economic growth is misunderstood because good African statistics often start in 1960 and are not very strong and because low commodity prices and other factors, possibly HIV and some very poor governments led Africa to have low growth in the 1980s and the 1990s which was then declared as normal despite it effectively being two poor decades.
The book also makes the point that if growth from 1960 to 1990 is divided into two 15 year sections Africa does fairly well in each, only huge growth in the 1975 to 1990 era by South and East Asia making Africa not look particularly good. It's curious here that for a book written in 2015 that the statistics stop in 1990.
Jerven then looks at how poor statistics are compressed and combined to present a picture of poor growth in Africa in the pre-colonial era. This also includes some asides into how The Economist and other news magazines have declared Africa lost and then doing well in the space of two or three years. He also points out how a number of the explanations for growth successes may be post fact rationalizations. The idea that growth and wealth might bring in good institutions rather than the other way around is very interesting.
The book also describes the big problems with modern African statistics in more detail. Due to low populations, low wealth and statistical tools designed to measure wealthy countries economies the accuracy of African statistics is very questionable. A number of African states have errors that are huge, in the order of 1/3 or more of the GDP per capita when comparing across different statistical agencies. This indicates huge inconsistencies and problems. Also rebasing is not done frequently enough and when it is done tends to have such a big effect that it overshadows actual economic changes.
The book concludes that poor numbers and dubious explanations have combined to create poor economic studies of Africa. The differences within Africa and the relative lack of wealth may have caused economists to make considerable errors. Jerven asserts that there is no Bottom Billion and that development stories have been driven by narrative fallacies based on quicksand. It's a really interesting idea and even if wrong the book is definitely worth reading.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Jerven demolishes the shoddy and incompetent statistics used by mainstream economists for analyzing Africa
By Epictetus (Hong Kong)
Jerven argues that most of the mainstream economists have made several mistakes when analyzing Africa. They:
1. begin with the assumption that country characteristics on the one hand and indicators of development levels on the other are causally related. This is a gigantic mistake.
2. fail to question the quality of data, and instead focus on the details of statistical process.
3. fail to question the quality and relevance of proxies used in economic analysis.
4. fail to address the problem of missing data, things that are uncounted or unrecorded.
5. in the case of many analyses, begin in 1960. While sometimes allowance is made for this, the arbitrary starting point inevitably shapes what questions are asked, and influences or determines what questions are not.
6. have in many cases been distorted either by the "African dummy variable", or by the search for it, which was ultimately futile.
7. begin with the assumption that there has been no growth, instead of finding evidence for this belief.
8. make unwarranted use of subjective and fabricated variables such as the "black market premium variable".
9. fail to make proper use of the discipline of economic history.
Jerven comments that “It is quite obvious that not all that can be counted counts and not all that counts is counted. But the impact of missing data on scholarly analysis is not usually appreciate it fully.”
Jerven demolishes the statistical credibility of the various attempts to show that slavery or some other historical factor explains the African problem — quite apart from the fact, as he sees it, that there is no such thing as an African problem. For example, one study that tried to prove that past slavery is the main cause of current problems in Africa took as an assumption the set of the ten the poorest countries in Africa. However there is little consensus across the leading major sets of statistical data as to which African countries are poor and which are rich. This is an example of a broader problem in African data of the high variability of income. One cause of the high variability is the high proportion of wealth that is agricultural, and therefore depends on the vagaries of the weather and the harvest and the market.
Jervon’s conclusions:
“The solution is to refocus the study of economics on the study of economics. The increasing distance between the observers and the observed has created a growing knowledge problem …. The toolbox of economists is conceptually Eurocentric.... The bottom line is that there is no ‘bottom billion’”.
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Attacks some popular analyses of Africa but offers little to replace them
By Andrew Batson
I came to this book hoping to get a better understanding of what's going on in African economies and how they are doing; maybe that was the wrong expectation, but that's not what I got. About three-quarters of the book seems to be arguing that Africa is doing better than than many people thought, as it criticizes a whole swathe of economic research about a supposed “chronic failure of growth” in Africa. I am very sympathetic to these criticisms, but even after accepting his arguments it’s not clear that we are left with a very positive growth picture for Africa. In the last quarter of the book Jerven then switches to arguing that Africa is in fact doing worse than some people think. He reviews some of his previous work on African GDP statistics to tackle the opposite side of the growth stagnation argument, and argues that the optimistic “Africa Rising” story of recent years is also overwrought and undersupported.
Unfortunately, Jerven does not spend much time building up a new narrative about Africa to replace the two that he demolishes. So non-specialist readers like myself are left unsure as to what the real picture is. On the whole I felt that too much of the book is devoted to internecine academic warfare, with the author attacking the theories of his opponents, and not enough to developing a coherent narrative about African economic development for the general reader.
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