Results for “africa” 1073 found
The African cake that cries when you eat it
The African Growth Miracle?
I had not previously read this 2009 paper by Alwyn Young (pdf):
Measures of real consumption based upon the ownership of durable goods, the quality of housing, the health and mortality of children, the education of youth and the allocation of female time in the household indicate that sub-Saharan living standards have, for the past two decades, been growing in excess of 3 percent per annum, i.e. more than three times the rate indicated in international data sets.
National income statistics, which in this context are untrustworthy, indicate a growth rate of only about one percent. Contra Young, here is a much less positive perspective, excerpt:
Yet this is nothing like the required economic advancement built around an actual or dominant “middle-class” milieu as commonly and quite wrongly suggested.
Africa’s burgeoning demography will challenge this future. Subsistence economies remain its anchors, and the alleged “demographic dividend”, that some blithely portray as a “driver”, will mostly transform into one of rising unemployment and growing informalisation.
Those who observe the lack of significant gains in African agricultural productivity often prefer the negative interpretation. Too many of the observed progress seems to come from mining wealth. In a recent short essay, Michael Lipton sums it up:
1. Stop kidding ourselves. (a) Faster GDP growth in Africa since 2000 is mainly a mining boom, with dubious benefits. Staples yields (and labour productivity) have not reversed the dismal trends that Peter Timmer diagnosed two decades ago: big, credible rises are seen in only a few African countries (e.g. Rwanda, Ghana). The populous ones (Ethiopia, Nigeria, maybe Kenya, above all DR Congo) tell a sad tale.
That we don’t know who is right is perhaps the most interesting fact of all.
Has Africa really turned the corner?
The paper shows that between 1975 and 2005 the size, diversity and sophistication of industry in Africa have all declined.
That is from a recent study by John Page, gated version here. The growth has come largely through commodities.
Hat tip goes to @ClaireMelamed.
Is there a Peltzman effect from AIDS treatment in Africa?
Somewhat, it seems. Plamen Nikolov, a job candidate from Harvard, reports (pdf):
AIDS treatment provides enormous mortality benets to infected individuals but because it immunologically insulates people from more risk-taking, it could, in theory, stir perverse behavioral responses. Therefore, the response of sexual behavior to AIDS treatment in Africa is an important input to predicting the path of the epidemic. Existing estimates from observational studies suggest limited behavioral response, but they fail to take into account possible differences across individuals seeking treatment. Using an encouragement design field experiment conducted in South Africa, I estimate behavioral responses subsequent to AIDS treatment. I find moderate negative responses to treatment for HIV + individuals and mixed results for HIV
South Africa’s gloomy economic present and future?
During the 2001-08 commodities boom, the world’s top 20 mining countries achieved an average mining growth rate of 5 per cent a year, but South Africa’s sector shrank by 1 per cent a year, according to the country’s Chamber of Mines. Only Venezuela, where leftwing president Hugo Chávez is nationalising large swatches of the mining industry, came close to matching that poor result.
…The reasons for the frustrated mood are numerous and vary according to the country’s rich basket of commodities. The decline is partly the result of the maturing nature of South Africa’s gold mines, which are getting deeper and more expensive to mine. Over the past 10 years annual production has halved to 192 tons. In 2008, the country was eclipsed by China as the world’s biggest gold producer, ending more than a century of South African dominance of the industry. Since then it has slipped to fifth place as Australia, the US and Russia have also overtaken South Africa.
Beyond gold, other factors are stymying the potential of the rest of the commodities sector. These include rising production costs, particularly labour and electricity, and infrastructure bottlenecks such as railway capacity for bulk commodities.
But…The most conspicuous cloud hanging over the industry has been an increasingly feisty debate about the nationalisation of mines, prompted by ever louder calls by Julius Malema, the radical leader of the ruling African National Congress’s Youth League, for the state to take control of the sector.
The story is here. Here is Dani Rodrik, circa 2006, on the economic problems of South Africa (pdf), which seems to be deindustrializing.
My favorite things South Africa
Torr writes to me:
Please will you consider doing a “favorite things South Africa” on Marginal Revolution. I’m also curious: have you ever visited South Africa?
I have yet to go, but here is what I admire so far:
1. Visual artist (you can’t quite call him a painter): William Kentridge. He is one of the contemporary artists who is both a realist and has a lot of the emotional power of the classics. His extraordinary body of work spans film, drawings, prints, and mixed media. Here are some images.
2. Home design: I am an admirer of the Ndebele, some photos of their colorful homes are here. They are better represented in picture books than on the web.
3. Movies: I don’t know many. I enjoyed The Gods Must be Crazy, even though some might find it slightly offensive. Nonetheless I hand the prize to District 9 for its interesting take on ethnic politics, its deconstruction and mock of Afrikaaner settler myths, and its commentary on how South Africans view Zimbabwean immigrants to their country.
4. Movie, set in: Zulu, 1964 with Michael Caine.
5. Novels: My favorite Coetzee is Disgrace, though I like most of them very much, including the early Life and Times of Michael K and Waiting for the Barbarians and the later semi-autobiographical works. Nadine Gordimer I find unreadable, call the fault mine. Same with Alan Paton. A dark horse pick is Trionf. Agaat sits in my pile, waiting for the trip of the right length.
6. Music: Where to start? Malanthini, for one. As for mbqanga collections, The Indestructible Beat of Soweto series is consistently excellent. Singing in an Open Space, Zulu Rhythm and Harmony 1962-1982 is a favorite. Random gospel and jazz collections often repay the purchase price and in general random CD purchases in these areas bring high expected returns.
7. Economists: Ludwig Lachmann was an early teacher of mine and I owe him my interest in post Keynesianism and also financial fragility hypotheses. G.F Thirlby remains underrated. W.H. Hutt was one of the most perceptive critics of Keynes and his insights still are not absorbed into the Keynesian mainstream. His book on the economics of the colour bar remains a liberal classic. Who am I forgetting?
The bottom line: There’s a lot here. Here are previous MR posts about South Africa.
Structural Unemployment in South Africa
Unemployment in South Africa is now running at 24% overall with significantly higher rates for blacks. A shift away from low-skill labor combined with minimum wages and strong trade unions, however, has meant that it is very difficult to lower wages and reduce unemployment. From a very good piece in the NYTimes:
The sheriff arrived at the factory here to shut it down, part of a national enforcement drive against clothing manufacturers who violate the minimum wage. But women working on the factory floor – the supposed beneficiaries of the crackdown – clambered atop cutting tables and ironing boards to raise anguished cries against it…
Further complicating matters, just as poorly educated blacks surged into the labor force, the economy was shifting to more skills-intensive sectors like retail and financial services, while agriculture and mining, which had historically offered opportunities for common laborers, were in decline.
The country’s leaders invested heavily in schools, hoping the next generation would overcome the country’s racist legacy, but the failures of the post-apartheid education system have left many poor blacks unable to compete in an economy where accountants, engineers and managers are in high demand….
Last year, as South Africa’s economy contracted amid the global
financial crisis, unions negotiated wage increases that averaged 9.3
percent [inflation is 5.1%, AT]….Eight months ago, Mr. Zuma proposed a wage subsidy
to encourage the hiring of young, inexperienced workers. But it ran
into vociferous opposition from Cosatu, the two-million-member trade
union federation that is part of the governing alliance [insiders v. outsiders, AT], which
contended that it would displace established workers.
Hat tip: Brandon Fuller.
Markets in everything Africa fact of the day
Desperate heroin users in a few African cities have begun engaging in a practice that is so dangerous it is almost unthinkable: they deliberately inject themselves with another addict’s blood, researchers say, in an effort to share the high or stave off the pangs of withdrawal.
The practice, called flashblood or sometimes flushblood, is not common, but has been reported in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on the island of Zanzibar and in Mombasa, Kenya.
It puts users at the highest possible risk of contracting AIDS and hepatitis.
Here is more, but perhaps that is all you need to know. The pointer comes from Steve Silberman.
What do we know about South African fiscal stimulus?
Stuart Torr writes to me:
I've been reading many economics blogs since the start of the crisis (and well before) and I've listened to all the Econtalk podcasts on the crisis. Some of the skepticism comes from the projects not being "shovel ready" and taking too long to have a real stimulative impact. South Africa didn't have a banking crisis but we had a dramatic housing bubble (by far the most dramatic in the world in % terms from checking the back of "the Economist") and we did enter recession after the crisis hit. We also have massive investment in infrastructure because of the World Cup and those projects were only really getting going when the crisis hit. I'm sure there are technical reasons why this isn't relevant to the stimulus debate, but I've barely even seen it mentioned anywhere. Is it really that irrelevant?
Unemployment in South Africa had been 23.5 percent. Yet, after the collapse and response, the unemployment rate is still rising and see also here for further information. It's like trying to catch a falling knife, there is more information here.
I don't know much about the South African economy, but I would think it is especially difficult to target many of the unemployed resources there. There is weak infrastructure, many language groups, large distances, and a lack of political unity.
Here is one critique of what they are doing in South Africa with fiscal stimulus. Here is a more positive treatment.
What do you all know about this case?
Africa fact of the day
For every 100 people put on treatment, 250 are newly infected, according to the United Nations‘ AIDS-fighting agency, Unaids.
There is more here and the article is interesting throughout. Victories in the war against AIDS in Africa are being reversed and fairly quickly at that.
More good news about Africa
This time it is from Alwyn Young:
Measures of real consumption based upon the ownership of durable goods, the quality of housing, the health and mortality of children, the education of youth and the allocation of female time in the household indicate that sub-Saharan living standards have, for the past two decades, been growing in excess of 3 percent per annum, i.e. more than three times the rate indicated in international data sets.
I thank an MR commentator for the pointer. Addendum: Link is now corrected.
African poverty is falling
Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Maxim Pinkovskiy report:
The conventional wisdom that Africa is not reducing poverty is wrong. Using the methodology of Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin (2009), we estimate income distributions, poverty rates, and inequality and welfare indices for African countries for the period 1970-2006. We show that: (1) African poverty is falling and is falling rapidly; (2) if present trends continue, the poverty Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people with incomes less than one dollar a day will be achieved on time; (3) the growth spurt that began in 1995 decreased African income inequality instead of increasing it; (4) African poverty reduction is remarkably general: it cannot be explained by a large country, or even by a single set of countries possessing some beneficial geographical or historical characteristic. All classes of countries, including those with disadvantageous geography and history, experience reductions in poverty. In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral-rich as well as mineral-poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below- or above-median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade.
Not only has poverty fallen in Africa as a whole, but this decline has been remarkably general across types of countries that the literature suggests should have different growth performances. In particular, poverty fell for both landlocked as well as coastal countries; for mineral rich as well as mineral poor countries; for countries with favorable or with unfavorable agriculture; for countries regardless of colonial origin; and for countries with below or above median slave exports per capita during the African slave trade. Hence, the substantial decline in poverty is not driven by any particular country or set of countries.
Mustafa Maluka, South African painter
You will find more images here. I have been reading the very good book South African Art Now.
African Successes
From Shanta Devajaran at the World Bank’s blog Africa Can…End Poverty, a post on African Successes.
In recent years, a broad swath of African countries has begun to show a remarkable dynamism. From Mozambique’s impressive growth rate (averaging 8% p.a. for more than a decade) to Kenya’s emergence as a major global supplier of cut flowers, from M-pesa’s mobile phone-based cash transfers to KickStart’s low-cost irrigation technology for small-holder farmers, and from Rwanda’s gorilla tourism to Lagos City’s Bus Rapid Transit system, Africa is seeing a dramatic transformation. This favorable trend is spurred by, among other things, stronger leadership, better governance, an improving business climate, innovation, market-based solutions, a more involved citizenry, and an increasing reliance on home-grown solutions. More and more, Africans are driving African development.
A very interesting list of examples and case studies follows. My colleague at the Independent Institute, Alvaro Vargas Llosa has also edited a recent book on this theme titled, Lessons from the Poor.
Question: How does focusing on successes change our view of development?
Hat tip J-J Rosa.
Wikipedia knowledge deserts Africa fact of the day
Almost the entire continent of Africa is geographically poorly represented in Wikipedia. Remarkably, there are more Wikipedia articles written about Antarctica than all but one of the 53 countries in Africa (or perhaps more amazingly, there are more Wikipedia articles written about the fictional places of Middle Earth and Discworld than about many countries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas).
There are some countries that are crammed with a dense amount of floating virtual information, such as Germany (with an average of one article tagged for every 65 square km), while others remain as virtual deserts, such as Chad (with an average of one tagged article every 17,000 square km).
Sharp divides between the Global North and the Global South can likewise be seen when looking at the number of geotagged articles per person. Austria, Iceland and Switzerland all have around one geotagged article for every 1,000 people, while in China or Guinea there is just over one article for every 500,000 people.
Here is the full article, interesting throughout and with a good map. For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.