Ben Durham

Foreign Impact on African Economics

In an attempt to dismantle our [Western & European]
predominate thinking about African economics, Morten Jerven receives
much flak in the economics field not only from Western colleagues but
from individuals in charge of statistics in African countries working
within the African National Accountants organization. Jerven critically
calls into question the reliability and accuracy of trade figures and data
that many European and other foreign consultants have marked
African countries to be pulling in annually. In addition the statistical
surface of data, which only gives a snapshot of specific economic cases
during specific periods of time, allows for a large margin of error in
making misleading conclusions about the reality of a places economic
stability.
Initially, statistical offices located around the continent like that
of Zambias reached out to Jerven angered and upset that he would
further exacerbate the international problem of predominate thinking
toward African economics by calling into question the legitimacy of
their data. In fact, Pali Lehohla, the South African Statistician-General
made a statement that said Jerven suggested that Africa misleads the
world with poor numbers when in reality Jervens message was that
poor numbers in data actually misleads the world about African
economics. Specifically the data, which may seem objective in nature,
are often based on wrong and misleading assumptions and
correlations, which ultimately lead to grand generalizations. The source
of this skewed data is due to the fact that socio-economic realities are
more than number crunching, referring to how GDP can be greatly
misleading about a countries actual growth. Jervens example of how
data can create a reality is the recent hype or rumor that a middleclass has emerged through recent developments in the continent.
However, with some scrutiny a closer look reveals that a middle-class
is still really non-existent in the way the data made it seem there
would be. Jervens solution to this problem is "for economics to be
relevant to economies, development economists should stop acting as
advocates for very specific models of economic development" (Jerven,
pg 131). In other words, the one size fits all econometrics approach to
African economics was a gigantic mistake and the European bias
problem already in existence only made it worse as European
economists tried using their own economic history to predict future
African economic climates. Not only was using European economic
history little use, it was very damaging to the economies in Africa
under growth.