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The upward revision of GDP in Ghana, announced in November 2010, attracted considerable attention in the media, in the development community, and from development scholars. This paper clarifies what caused this upward revision and discusses how the revision was handled. Many other countries have outdated base years and do not utilize data sources fully. They can learn from the Ghanaian experience
The unreliability of African income estimates was highlighted when Ghana announced that GDP estimates were revised upwards by 60.3 percent in November 2010. Similar revisions are to be expected in other countries. Many statistical offices are currently using outdated base years. It is argued that with the current uneven application of methods and poor availability of data, any ranking of countries
What is the role of the economics discipline in teaching and studying international development today? This paper draws upon experiences of teaching and reading economics with students in interdisciplinary international development studies. The main conclusion is that economic literacy is a key ingredient in development studies. This paper discusses different interpretations of what economic liter
The political economy of agricultural policies – why certain interventions may be preferred by political leaders rather than others – is well recognized. This paper explores a perspective that has previously been neglected: the political economy of the agricultural statistics. In developing economies, the data on agricultural production are weak. Because these data are assembled using competing me
This article aims to make an empirical and theoretical contribution towards the creation of a continent-wide dataset on African population extending into the pre-1950 era. We investigate the reliability and the validity of the current population databases with the aim of working towards a consensus on the long-term series of African total population with a reliable 1950 benchmark. The cases of Ken
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 then examining the roots of the problem of provision of statistics in poor economies is certainly of great importance.
There has been a recent surge in research on long-term African development. For this research agenda to be fruitful and its theories tested, it is crucial to have consistent estimates of economic change. However, there is a lack of reliable time series data for the colonial period in Sub-Saharan Africa. This article contributes new time series data for the Gold Coast and Ghana between 1890 and 201
African trade statistics suffer from errors of commission and omission. A quarter-century ago, Alexander Yeats (1990) compared receipts of importers and exporters and concluded that the data could not be used to determine the magnitude, direction, or composition of trade. The only fact to be safely deduced from the evidence was that the statistics were plagued by widespread smuggling and/or underr
Measurement is increasingly at the centre of debates in African economic development. Some remarkable upward revisions of GDP, which are signs of statistical systems improving, caused the declaration of a statistical tragedy in Africa. This special issue evaluates the database for African economic development with articles on the quality of the data on GDP, health and education, poverty, labour, a
The quality of economic statistics in Africa has been likened to a statistical tragedy. Currently many statistical systems in Africa are being updated. This report from the statistical offices in Nigeria, Liberia and Zimbabwe documents that base year, data and methods used to generate GDP estimates currently date from 1990, 1992 and 1994. There is a growing need for macroeconomic statistics, but a
