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A wealth of new data have been unearthed in recent years on African economic growth, wages, living standards, and taxes. In The Wealth and Poverty of African States, Morten Jerven shows how these findings transform our understanding of African economic development. He focuses on the central themes and questions that these state records can answer, tracing how African states evolved over time and the historical footprint they have left behind. By connecting the history of the colonial and postcolonial periods, he reveals an aggregate pattern of long-run growth from the late nineteenth century into the 1970s, giving way to widespread failure and decline in the 1980s, and then followed by two decades of expansion since the late 1990s. The result is a new framework for understanding the causes of poverty and wealth and the trajectories of economic growth and state development in Africa across the twentieth century.
A wealth of new data have been unearthed in recent years on African economic growth, wages, living standards, and taxes. In The Wealth and Poverty of African States, Morten Jerven shows how these findings transform our understanding of African economic development. He focuses on the central themes and questions that these state records can answer, tracing how African states evolved over time and the historical footprint they have left behind. By connecting the history of the colonial and postcolonial periods, he reveals an aggregate pattern of long-run growth from the late nineteenth century into the 1970s, giving way to widespread failure and decline in the 1980s, and then followed by two decades of expansion since the late 1990s. The result is a new framework for understanding the causes of poverty and wealth and the trajectories of economic growth and state development in Africa across the twentieth century.
List of figures; List of tables; Preface; Acknowledgements; Overview of the book; 1. A new economic history for Africa?; 2. Seeing like an African state in the twentieth century; 3. New data and new perspectives on economic growth in Africa; 4. State capacity across the twentieth century: evidence from taxation with Thilo Albers and Marvin Suesse; 5. Wages and poverty: from roots of poverty to trajectories of living standards; 6. Conclusion; List of references; Endnotes; Index.
A new account of economic performance and state development in African countries across the long twentieth century.
Morten Jerven has a Ph.D. in Economic History from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. His previous publications include Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What to Do about It (2013) and Africa: Why Economists Get It Wrong (2015).
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