Africa: Why Economists Get it Wrong

6 septiembre, 2015 por Felipe Sahagún | 0 Comentarios

Financial Times ✔ @FinancialTimes

Opinion: Africa: Why Economists Get it Wrong http://on.ft.com/1Nc3kAT

8:56 PM – 6 Sep 2015

Review by Katrina Manson

Africa is becoming something of a trend. Analysts have recently sought to paint the continent as a rising one — marked not by war and pestilence but by aspirational consumers who, no matter how little money they might have, keep on spending. Growth rates for sub-Saharan Africa outstrip those of almost all other regions in the world save emerging Asia, so it seems such contrarians have a point.

But Morten Jerven is more interested in exploding a different piece of conventional wisdom: whether Africa ever stopped growing at all. His short book rails against those who share his craft. He says there was no “chronic failure of growth” and that economists should stop looking for damning explanations for something that never happened. Instead, he wants us to think of African growth as cyclical or episodic rather than failed.

He reserves particular scorn for Paul Collier, the Oxford academic who popularised the idea of the “Bottom Billion” — the mass of poor people who live in low-growth societies. “The bottom line is that there is no ‘Bottom Billion’,” Jerven argues.

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