The Wealth and Poverty of African States
The Wealth and Poverty of African States
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.
- Offers a new perspective on African economic development in the twentieth century
- Provides a synthesis of quantitative empirical contributors over the past decade
- Will appeal to a broad range of scholars and students across economic history, African history, African politics, African studies, development studies and development economics
Product details
January 2022Adobe eBook Reader
9781108627054
0 pages
This ISBN is for an eBook version which is distributed on our behalf by a third party.
Table of Contents
- 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.
