Studying Africa's Large Numbers

Abstract

Morten Jerven's work offers a historical perspective on the techniques used by national administrations and international organizations to quantify and analyze the growth of African economies. In his view, the work of statisticians and economists has largely failed to account for national economic and social realities since the beginning of the structural adjustment period. The informalization of economies, the weakness of statistical institutions, and the lack of methodological rigor among international experts have led to the production of statistical fictions. Jerven's analysis calls into question the usual narratives produced by quantitative economic history, such as that of an African economic failure since 1960. It also opens a dialogue with the sociology of quantification, highlighting cases where growth calculations appear arbitrary. However, his methodology suffers from a number of weaknesses. While his earliest works were based on detailed national case studies, Jerven's recent analyses have focused on the critique of continent-wide discourses, in particular international comparisons and econometric studies of growth. His work has thus moved away from a careful ethnography of numbers toward a focus on the denunciation of global practices. This shift prevents the author from making precise reflections on the various roles of numbers in African societies, the multiple positions and modes of action that quantification engages, or the specific historical trajectories which calculations of African growth are supposed to represent.