My latest paper in the Canadian Journal of Development studies is a suggestion for how we can teach economics to interdisciplinary students in development studies. This is the abstract: What is the role of the economics discipline in teaching and studying international development today?...
Read more ›
The Political Economy of Agricultural Statistics
My most recent paper now available in Early View from the Journal of Agrarian Change. 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...
Read more ›
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...
Read more ›
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...
Read more ›
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...
Read more ›
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...
Read more ›
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...
Read more ›
Book Launch at LSE on the Wednesday 22 May at 6 PM
On Monday I present at the Centre of African Studies, University of Cambridge (5 pm, Room S2, Audrey Richards Building) and then on Tuesday at Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex. On Wednesday there is a book launch and signing at the London...
Read more ›