Culture | The economics of Africa

No fear to tread

How do economists talk about Africa?

Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong. By Morten Jerven. Zed Books; 160 pages; $21.95 and £14.99.

ECONOMISTS who study Africa use dodgy theory and inappropriate statistical techniques, and at times deliberately mislead. In an interesting and highly readable book, Morten Jerven, himself an economist of Africa at Simon Fraser University in Canada, pulls no punches. He offers a devastating critique of the economics profession and asks provocative questions. But he overstates his case and offers few practical solutions.

For decades people have tried to explain why Africa has stubbornly remained poor. Explanations range from the legacy of colonialism and dependency on natural resources to “some inherent character flaw”. To show the relative importance of these factors, economists rely heavily on fancy statistical tests, crunching data from dozens of countries across many decades.

Mr Jerven dislikes this approach. It places too much trust in African data, much of which is horribly unreliable. In 2014 GDP growth in South Sudan was either 5% or 36%, depending on whether you believe the IMF or the World Bank. Estimates vary wildly because African industrial surveys are often out-of-date and many national-statistics bodies treat their economies as if they had not changed in decades.

You might presume that economists would hesitate before conducting even the simplest analysis of the continent. Not a bit of it: plenty of papers employ highly complex statistical techniques to make ambitious arguments. An influential paper by two economists from MIT and one from Harvard argues that income levels in African countries today were shaped by the rate at which colonial settlers died there centuries before. The paper suggests that when areas were disease-ridden, colonists would plunder all they could, then flee. The resulting chaos echoed down the centuries. But when the disease environment was benign, colonists would set up shop, creating a more harmonious society that laid the foundations for growth.

It is an entrancing argument; but Mr Jerven thinks it exemplifies all that is wrong with economists’ views of Africa. If people cannot even be sure about African countries’ GDP today, what hope for centuries-old data? Yet economists are rarely frank about the uncertainties that plague their data. And they make heroic assumptions to help their analysis along.

The MIT/Harvard paper, like much research on Africa, suffers from another flaw: it compresses centuries of history into whizzy statistical tests. This is something of a current fad. Recent contributions find that African countries’ poverty today may be explained, for example, by the fact that in pre-colonial times the tsetse fly thrived there or that their pre-colonial populations could not digest milk. All this wacky economics ignores the complex history in between, he says, and so is of little value.

Here Mr Jerven overplays his hand. He bandies about the word “ahistorical”, without saying what that really means. And economists seldom claim to have identified the only factor that determines Africa’s income today. The point, rather, is to find the factors that have a systematic influence. That does not obviate the necessity of detailed historical work on individual countries; rather, the two approaches complement each other.

Another argument is also taken too far. Mr Jerven contends that the quest to explain why economic growth “has failed” in Africa is inherently misguided; such failure “never happened”. During the 1950s, 1960s, 1990s and 2000s Africa grew rapidly. But economists like to focus on the weak growth of the 1970s and 1980s, leading them to discuss only why Africa has done badly, and never why it has done well.

It seems odd for Mr Jerven to put such weight on this point, given his views on the unreliability of African economic data. And economists will counter that even if the continent’s GDP is now growing, Africa still has by far the highest level of infant mortality, the lowest life expectancy and the poorest education of any continent. Investigating why is a far-from-useless research question.

By the end of the book, the reader is at a loss. Mr Jerven’s call for economists to “abandon” complex statistical analysis of Africa, instead to focus on “deep contextual studies of history and institutions”, sounds appealing but is frustratingly vague. Yet as an introduction to African economics—particularly for non-specialists—his book is certainly worth reading.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "No fear to tread"

Empire of the geeks and what could wreck it

From the July 25th 2015 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

Could your marriage survive a shipwreck?

“Maurice and Maralyn”, a new book about a couple stranded almost four months at sea, makes you wonder

What lies behind Beyoncé’s country turn?

The star singer has always been a canny interpreter of musical trends


Museums are becoming more expensive

Will it kill off future patronage and attendance?