Africa Check is a non-profit organisation which promotes accuracy in public debate. One of the things they do is to check the accuracy of numbers used in the public domain in South Africa and beyond. It is therefor nice to see they have reviewed...
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Category: Poor Numbers
GDP in Ghana – Two lines
As I have discussed elsewhere (here, here and here), in 2010, Ghana changed its base year for GDP calculation from 1993 to 2006, and the cumulative effect of change in methods, base year and adding new data on economic activities meant that total GDP...
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Poor Numbers Presentation at Birmingham
On 7 May 2013 I presented Poor Numbers at the Africa Talks of the University of Birmingham. It was filmed and is now posted. http://youtu.be/ypGikIFf8LM
Book talk at UMB in Ås, Norway
I present my book at noon on August 13 at the UMB School of Economics and Business, recipe and then on August 14, there is a public event in from 6 pm, organized by Vitenparken, called Perspektiver på Afrika. Poor Numbers will be available for...
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Poor Numbers featured in Nature’s Summer Books
In the short review, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, writes: This book offers fascinating, disturbing insights for anyone interested in the role of numbers in the social sciences. For those using global economic databases, it should be required reading. Read more here.
The Lancet
Poor Numbers gets a favourable mention in The Lancet. The call it a superb book about development statistics Read the short review here.
Situational Analysis of the Reliability of Economic Statistics in Africa: Special Focus on GDP Measurement
That is the title of a recently released report from the African Development Bank. As you might guess the report has been motivated by the data quality concerns expressed in Poor Numbers but the preface oddly spends time not discussing data quality or the...
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IMF Regional Outlook Report for Sub-Saharan Africa May 2013
The IMF REO for Sub-Saharan Africa was released in May, no rx and it is good to see that the authors of the report considers the importance of base years in Box 1.1 on page 4: One factor raising concerns about the quality of...
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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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Africa at LSE reviews my book – and an interview with the Africa Research Institute
Gerardo Serra, for sale who is a PhD student in the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics and does fascinating work on the political economy of statistics in Ghana and the Gold Coast reviews Poor Numbers for the Africa at...
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