Morten Jerven Morten Jerven

When A Poor Country Gets A Lot Richer

Planet Money, on National Public Radio spoke to me about Ghana, GDP revisions and statistics in Africa and summarized as: People talk about GDP as if it means something solid, as if it's a mathematically derived and agreed upon fact. But in conversations we've...
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What caused Africa’s recent growth?

In Foreign Affairs I explain that the recent growth is partly good news and partly fiction. The GDPs of many African countries appear to be soaring, which is partly a statistical fluke due to recent corrections of decades of bad data. African countries now...
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