The Economics of Contemporary Africa

Abstract

For the social sciences, numbers and figures are at once fascinating and ambiguous. Their validity is often fragile, always open to challenges, but their claim to precision (real or apparent) means that they carry a considerable power of suggestion. Their capacity to order the world thus extends far beyond an academic or scientific framework to form an essential political tool for contemporary societies, as Alain Desrosières has shown. Moreover, their universalization is directly linked to the ever-closer connections established between different parts of the world since the early modern era, followed by the development of international institutions since the end of the Second World War. However, the production of numbers remains an open question, as does their capacity to describe social and economic realities in a reliable way. This is particularly the case when they are applied in a standard fashion to contexts that are profoundly different from those in which they emerged. These difficulties have returned to the forefront of debate thanks to two incisive and provocative books by Morten Jerven, devoted to the production of quantitative data and the use of figures in research on African economies, whether today or in the distant past. The aim of Jerven’s work is to show the weakness of many of the statistics used by development economists. This is particularly the case when it comes to the gross domestic product (GDP) of the anglophone countries of sub-Saharan Africa post-independence (Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia), which Jerven studies at length in order to demonstrate the highly questionable principles underlying its fabrication. Calculation of GDP aggregates very diverse kinds of accounting data, and measuring it is a delicate operation that demands a high degree of caution, even in developed countries with high-performing statistical institutes that can draw on a long and stable tradition. The difficulty is even more pronounced in Africa, where economic and social realities are not only very heterogeneous but 503