Is it Africa's Turn?
Appendix of ResourcesSome of the best-known academic work that speaks to the debate on African economic development includes Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson and Simon Johnson (2001) “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation”, American Economic Review; Robert Bates (1981) Markets and States in Tropical Africa, University of California Press; Paul Collier and Jan Gunning (1999) “Explaining African Economic Performance”, Journal of Economic Literature; William Easterly and Ross Levine (1997) “Africa’s Growth Tragedy: Policies and Ethnic Divisions” Quarterly Journal of Economics; Jeffrey Herbst (2000) States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control, Princeton University Press; and Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner (1997) “Sources of Slow Growth in African Economies” Journal of African Economies, among many others.
Several insightful World Bank publications discuss Africa’s recent economic growth, including: Recent Economic Performance in Sub-Saharan Africa, AFRCE, April 12, 2006; Accelerating Development Outcomes in Africa: Progress and Change in the Africa Action Plan, Development Committee, April 15, 2007; Challenges of African Growth: Opportunities, Constraints and Strategic Decisions, Benno Ndulu (with Lopamudra Chakraborti, Lebohang Lijane, Vijaya Ramachandran, and Jerome Wolgin), 2007; and Africa’s Silk Road: China and India’s New Economic Frontier, Harry G. Broadman (with Gozde Isik, Sonia Plaza, Xiao Ye, and Yutaka Yushino), 2007.
Oil prices can be found on the U.S. Department of Energy website at http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/hist/wtotworldw.htm; copper prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange website http://www.nymex.com/cop_fut_histspot.aspx; and coffee prices on the International Coffee Organization website http://www.ico.org/asp/select10.asp.
For a theoretical discussion of how economic growth in China and India could affect long-run prospects in Africa, see Marcos Chamon and Michael Kremer (2006) “Asian Growth and African Development” in the American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings.
For a fascinating discussion of how telecommunications technology is affecting African economies, see Jenny Aker, “Does Digital Provide or Divide? The Impact of Cell Phones on Grain Markets in Niger,” unpublished working paper University of California, Berkeley.
A recent article contains interesting interviews with Chinese investors in Africa, “Entrepreneurs From China Flourish in Africa”, NYT, August 18, 2007, by Howard W. French and Lydia Polgreen. Another nice reference on Chinese influence in Africa is “China’s Trade in Africa Carries a Price Tag”, New York Times, August 21, 2007, by Lydia Polgreen, and Howard W. French.
Ray Fisman makes a related point about how western sanctions may strengthen Chinese bargaining power in Sudan in “Diamonds are a Guerrilla’s Best Friend,” Slate, August 17, 2007.
An influential reference on the global implications of U.S. cotton subsidies is Oxfam’s 2002 Briefing Paper #30 “Cultivating Poverty: The Impact of U.S. Cotton Subsidies on Africa.”
For discussion of foreign aid, refer to Jeffrey Sachs (2005) The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, Penguin Press; and William Easterly (2006) The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Penguin Press. Other important contributions in this vast literature include William Easterly (2003) “Can Foreign Aid Buy Growth?”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, and Adam Przeworski and James R. Vreeland (2000) “The impact of IMG programs on economic growth,” Journal of Development Economics. Figure 2 in Easterly (2003) clearly illustrates the sharp drop off in foreign aid at the Cold War’s end.
The Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO) / Uppsala Armed Conflict Database contains the most widely used measures of global armed conflict.
Two recent research papers on post-war legacies are Christopher Blattman (2007), “From Violence to Voting: War and political participation in Uganda.” Manuscript, Yale University; and John Bellows and Edward Miguel (2008) “War and Local Collective Action in Sierra Leone,” manuscript University of California, Berkeley.
For the research on economic shocks and civil war, refer to the research papers: Edward Miguel, Shanker Satyanath, and Ernest Sergenti (2004) “Economic Shocks and Civil Conflict: An Instrumental Variables Approach,” Journal of Political Economy, and Markus Bruckner and Antonio Ciccone (2007) “Growth, Democracy, and Civil War,” manuscript Pompeu Fabra.
For further work describing the Rapid Conflict Prevention Support proposal, see my articles “Poverty and Violence: An Overview of Recent Research and Implications for Foreign Aid”, in Too Poor for Peace? Global Poverty, Conflict and Security in the 21st Century, (eds.) Lael Brainard and Derek Chollet, Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2007; “Stop Conflict Before it Starts”, September 18, 2006 in Businessweek. RCPS is laid out in greater detail in my forthcoming book with Ray Fisman, Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations (Princeton University Press). The discussion of climate change below also draws on the forthcoming book.
For more information on Botswana’s drought relief program, refer to Theodore Valentine (1993), “Drought, Transfers, Entitlements and Income Distribution: The Botswana Experience,” World Development 21, no. 1: 109–26.
I had a conversation with President Masire about the drought relief program on August 2, 2006 in Aspen, Colorado, at the Brookings-Blum Roundtable examining “The Tangled Web: Breaking the Poverty-Insecurity Nexus” conference.
The International Energy Agency Statistics, 2007 (www.iea.org) contains detailed global data on CO2 emissions.
The predicted temperature changes mentioned in the text are for the range of low emission to high emission scenarios described in the 2007 IPCC Report: see http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Pub_SPM-v2.pdf, page 13.
The discussion of climate change in the Sahel is based on my ongoing research with John Dykema of Harvard and Shanker Satyanath and Ernest Sergenti of NYU. There is no single accepted definition of the Sahel. The following organizations have different definitions: USAID (http://www.usaid.gov/press/factsheets/2005/fs050803.html), the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (http://www.africa-union.org/root/au/RECs/cen_sad.htm), and the International Development Research Centre (http://www.idrc.ca/en/ev-43109-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html). A reasonable definition of the Sahel includes parts of the following 15 countries: Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, and Sudan. The climate estimates for the Sahel come from a convenient geographic rectangle bounded between 4-25 degrees North latitude and 13 degrees West and 17 degrees East longitude. The per capita GDP figure in the text is population weighted for these countries (minus Somalia, which has no reliable national income figures for recent years) and comes from the World Development Indicators (http://devdata.worldbank.org/wdi2006/contents/cover.htm). Income is not adjusted for purchasing power.
For more on Latin America’s tumultuous post-independence era, see Chris Leuchars. To the Bitter End: Paraguay and the War of the Triple Alliance, 2002, Greenwood Publishing, Westport CT. For a comparison of post-independence Latin America and Africa, refer to Robert Bates, John H. Coatsworth, and Jeffrey G. Williamson (2006), “Lost Decades: Lessons from Post-Independence Latin America for Today’s Africa”, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper #12610.
Readers interested in the randomized evaluation methodology should refer to Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer, and Rachel Glennerster’s (2008) Handbook of Development Economics chapter “Using Randomization in Development Economics Research: A Toolkit” for a detailed discussion of the method, as well as a discussion of seminal randomized experimental studies within economics, including Robert J. Lalonde’s (1986) piece “Evaluating the Econometric Evaluations of Training Programs Using Experimental Data”, American Economic Review, 76(4), 602-620. The Mexican Progresa program was a pioneering use of randomized evaluation within development economics, see T. Paul Schultz (2004), “School subsidies for the poor: evaluating Mexico’s Progresa poverty program”, Journal of Development Economics, 74(1), 199-250.
Kremer and Miguel’s main nonprofit collaborators are currently: Innovations for Poverty Action (website: http://www.poverty-action.org/) the MIT J-PAL - http://www.povertylab.com/, and the Berkeley CEGA - http://cega.berkeley.edu/.
The academic paper on deworming is Edward Miguel and Michael Kremer, “Worms: Identifying Impacts on Education and Health in the Presence of Treatment Externalities”, Econometrica, 2004, 72(1), 159-217. This and the other Busia studies can also be found on the J-PAL website.
Researchers in Busia have also recently used randomized evaluation to assess which types of sex education lessons are most effective in preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases among young African schoolgirls. In case you’re wondering, traditional sex education doesn’t reduce unsafe sex, but targeted lessons warning girls about older “sugar daddies” do. See Pascaline Dupas, 2006, “Relative Risks and the Market for Sex:¬†Teenagers, Sugar Daddies, and HIV in Kenya,” unpublished working paper, Dartmouth University, and Duflo, Esther, Pascaline Dupas, Kremer, and Samuel Sinei, “Education and HIV/AIDS Prevention: Evidence from a randomized evaluation in Western Kenya,” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper #4024, June 2006.
For information on deworming in Ghana, refer to UNICEF press release, “4.5 million children across Ghana to be dewormed”, February 5, 2007.
The best reference on how randomized evaluations can be used to understand which policies can reduce corruption and improve governance is Ben Olken, 2007, “Monitoring Corruption: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Indonesia”, Journal of Political Economy, 115(2), 200-249.
Maintaining the highest ethical standards is a very important issue for impact evaluations. All academic research projects involving human subjects must be approved by a university’s institutional review board, to ensure that the ethical lapses of the past are not repeated today. This includes all of the Busia projects described above, as well as the Olken study.
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About the Author
Edward Miguel is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is co-author of the upcoming Economic Gangsters: Corruption, Violence, and the Poverty of Nations.
