How do we measure African economic performance? This volume studies how growth is measured in Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia and challenges commonly held beliefs of African economic performance.

The chief economist for the World Bank's Africa region, Shanta Devarajan, delivered a devastating assessment of the capacity of African states to measure development in his 2013 article 'Africa's Statistical Tragedy'. Is there a 'statistical tragedy' unfolding in Africa now? If so, it becomes important to examine the roots of the problem as far as the provision of statistics in poor economies is concerned. This book, on measuring African development in the past and in the present, draws on the historical experience of colonial French West Africa, Ghana, Sudan, Mauritania and Tanzania and the...

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...