African oil and gas are increasingly in demand because of technological advances, rising commodity prices, and an extreme global thirst for energy. Countries like Niger, Uganda, Chad, Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania are looking at the prospect of previously unimaginable flows of money into their national budgets.
The story of African oil, however, is historically associated with disaster. Today, older producers, such as Angola, Nigeria, and Cameroon, have little to show for the many billions of dollars they ve earned. Oil money has been shown to fuel conflict and corruption in these areas,...

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 1990sand, until a collapse in the 70s and 80s, they had been growing reliably for decades. Puncturing weak analysis that relies...