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Studying Africa's Large Numbers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2018

Boris Samuel
Boris Samuel*
Affiliation:
Chaire d’études africaines comparées, École de gouvernance et d’économie de Rabat (EGE) Centre de recherches internationales de Sciences Po (CERI)
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Abstract

Morten Jerven's work offers a historical perspective on the techniques used by national administrations and international organizations to quantify and analyze the growth of African economies. In his view, the work of statisticians and economists has largely failed to account for national economic and social realities since the beginning of the structural adjustment period. The informalization of economies, the weakness of statistical institutions, and the lack of methodological rigor among international experts have led to the production of statistical fictions. Jerven's analysis calls into question the usual narratives produced by quantitative economic history, such as that of an African economic failure since 1960. It also opens a dialogue with the sociology of quantification, highlighting cases where growth calculations appear arbitrary. However, his methodology suffers from a number of weaknesses. While his earliest works were based on detailed national case studies, Jerven's recent analyses have focused on the critique of continent-wide discourses, in particular international comparisons and econometric studies of growth. His work has thus moved away from a careful ethnography of numbers toward a focus on the denunciation of global practices. This shift prevents the author from making precise reflections on the various roles of numbers in African societies, the multiple positions and modes of action that quantification engages, or the specific historical trajectories which calculations of African growth are supposed to represent.

Type
The Economics of Contemporary Africa
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , Volume 71 , Issue 4 , December 2016 , pp. 557 - 579
Copyright
Copyright © Éditions EHESS 2018 

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Footnotes

This article was translated from the French by Cadenza Academic Translations with the support of Cairn International's “Monthly Dossiers” program. It was edited by Chloe Morgan and Nicolas Barreyre.

*I would like to thank Agnès Labrousse and Vincent Bonnecase for their exchanges about Morten Jerven's work, which have greatly assisted me in formulating the analysis presented in this article.

References

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9. Jerven, Poor Numbers, chap. 1. Jerven has also published various articles that develop his PhD thesis in detail. See, for example, Jerven, “The Relativity of Poverty and Income: How Reliable Are African Economic Statistics?” African Affairs 109, no. 434 (2010): 77 – 96.

10. Jerven, Africa, 12 – 44.

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12. Ibid., 188.

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31. See also Jerven, Morten, “Users and Producers of African Income: Measuring the Progress of African Economies,” African Affairs 110, no. 439 (2011): 169 – 90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The process of fashioning standardized aggregates such as GDP began after World War II, but international normalization was not complete until 1968.

32. See in particular the case studies included in Jerven, Economic Growth.

33. On this point, see the view expressed by Agnès Labrousse in the present issue of the Annales: she believes that Jerven's work could provide much more ambitious conclusions at a historical level by identifying different “ways of acting on the economy” through numbers, expanding on the analyses of Desrosières in “Managing the Economy.”

34. Jerven, Poor Numbers, chap. 4.

35. Jerven, Africa, 10.

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39. Jerven, Africa, 62 – 65.

40. Unlike Antony Hopkins, whom he frequently cites, and who is much more critical. See Hopkins, Antony G., “The New Economic History of Africa,” Journal of African History 50, no. 2 (2009): 155 – 77CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 173.

41. Jerven, Economic Growth, 18.

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43. Jerven, Poor Numbers, 42; Jerven, “Un demi-siècle de fictions de croissance en Afrique”; Jerven, Africa, 19.

44. For an in-depth study of these points, see Agnès Labrousse, “Poor Numbers. Statistical Chains and the Political Economy of Numbers,” Annales HSS (English Edition) 71, no. 4 (2016): 507 – 38.

45. With reference to the work of Sally Engle Merry: see Jerven, Poor Numbers, xii.

46. He refers to Theodore Porter to consider the link between mutual trust and numbers, and to Mary Morgan for the link that she establishes between economic models and narratives. See Porter, Trust in Numbers; Morgan, Mary S., “Models, Stories and the Economic World,” Journal of Economic Methodology 8, no. 3 (2001): 361 – 84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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52. Hopkins, “The New Economic History of Africa”; Jerven, Africa, chap. 1.

53. See his argument concerning path dependence and causality in economic history: Jerven, Africa, chap. 2. See also Jerven, Morten, “A Clash of Disciplines? Economists and Historians Approaching the African Past,” Economic History of Developing Regions 26, no. 2 (2011): 111 – 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a response to Fenske, James, “The Causal History of Africa: A Response to Hopkins,” Economic History of Developing Regions 25, no. 2 (2010): 177 – 212CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Fenske in turn responds to Fenske, Jerven in, “The Causal History of Africa: Replies to Jerven and Hopkins,” Economic History of Developing Regions 26, no. 2 (2011): 125 – 31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54. Jerven, Africa, chap. 1.

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65. Fioramonti, Gross Domestic Problem, chap. 1.

66. Ibid., chap. 2. See, as early as the 1930s, the critique by economist Simon Kuznets, National Income and Capital Formation, 1919 – 1935: A Preliminary Report (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1937).

67. André Vanoli, Une histoire de la comptabilité nationale (Paris: La Découverte, 2002).

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69. GDP also raises interest in the rare cases where it passes the threshold fixed for middle-income countries, as Jerven points out in regard to Ghana in 2010.

70. Boris Samuel, “Calcul macroéconomique et modes de gouvernement : les cas de la Mauritanie et du Burkina Faso,” Politique africaine 124 (2011): 101 – 26.

71. AFRISTAT is an international organization created in 1993. Based in Bamako, it now covers twenty-two member countries.

72. Boris Samuel, “La production macroéconomique du réel,” chap. 1; Blaise Leenhardt and Jean-Joël Aerts, “Présentation du modèle macro-économique TABLO, modèle standard de projection à court--moyen terme de la CCCE,” Statéco 58/59 (1989): 49 – 82.

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74. Jerven, Poor Numbers, 96 sq.

75. For a detailed ethnography of the IMF, see Harper, Richard H. R., Inside the IMF: An Ethnography of Documents, Technology, and Organizational Action (San Diego: Academic Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

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82. Desrosières, Prouver et gouverner, 111 – 21.

83. Jerven, “Users and Producers of African Income”; Jerven, Poor Numbers, 36 – 40.

84. Hallu, René et al., “Réalités africaines et enquêtes budget-consommation,” Économie et statistique 11 (1970): 21 – 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Serra, “An Uneven Statistical Topography.”

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86. Hallu et al., “Réalités africaines.”

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90. Ibid.

91. Jane I. Guyer and Christopher Udry, “Balances: Household Budgets in a Ghanaian Study,” in Marginal Gains: Monetary Transactions in Atlantic Africa, ed. Jane I. Guyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 131 – 71; Christopher Udry and Hyungi Woo, “Households and the Social Organization of Consumption in Southern Ghana,” African Studies Review 50, no. 2 (2007): 139 – 53.

92. Polly Hill, “Some Puzzling Spending Habits in Ghana,” Economic Bulletin [of the Economic Society of Ghana] 10 (1957): 3 – 11, cited in Guyer, Marginal Gains, 131.

93. Guyer, Marginal Gains, 134.

94. Ibid., 135.

95. Ibid., 141.

96. Ibid., 131 – 32.

97. Hill, “Some Puzzling Spending Habits,” cited in Guyer, Marginal Gains, 131.

98. See the introduction to Jerven, Measuring African Development, 1 – 8.

99. See Jerven, Africa, 102 sq., on the debate that he held with Shantayanan Devarajan, chief economist of World Bank Africa, about the existence of a “statistical tragedy in Africa.”

100. Statisticians cite in return the inability of monographs to provide a transversal view of society: see Alain Desrosières, “L'opposition entre deux formes d'enquête : monographie et statistique” [1988], in L'Argument statistique, vol. 1, Pour une sociologie historique de la quantification (Paris: Presses de l’École des mines, 2008).

101. According to the analytical approach classically used in the sociology of quantification, notably Desrosières and Thévenot, Les catégories socioprofessionnelles. On the metaphor of the production line, see Thévenot, Laurent, “From Social Coding to Economics of Convention: A Thirty-Year Perspective on the Analysis of Qualification and Quantification Investments,” Historical Social Research 41, no. 2 (2016): 7 – 10Google Scholar.

102. Harper, Inside the IMF; Speich, “Travelling with the GDP.”

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105. Hibou, Béatrice, La bureaucratisation du monde à l’ère néolibérale (Paris: La Découverte, 2012)Google Scholar, 172.

106. Thévenot, “From Social Coding to Economics of Convention”; Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences (Cambridge: Mit Press, 1999); Espeland, Wendy Nelson and Stevens, Mitchell L., “Commensuration as a Social Process,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 312 – 43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

107. Jerven, Poor Numbers, 8 – 32; Jerven, Africa, chaps. 1 and 2.

108. As was the case for neoclassical economics: see Dezalay, Yves and Garth, Bryant, The Internationalization of Palace Wars: Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest to Transform Latin American States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

109. See the references given in notes 84 to 93 above.