Africa Check is a non-profit organisation which promotes accuracy in public debate. One of the things they do is to check the accuracy of numbers used in the public domain in South Africa and beyond. It is therefor nice to see they have reviewed Poor Numbers.
Disturbingly, pharm Jerven explains that these all-important statistics have taken on “a dangerously misleading air of accuracy, ed and the resulting figures are used to make critical decisions that allocate scarce resources”.
“International development actors are making judgments based on erroneous statistics. Governments are not able to make informed decisions because existing data are too weak or the data they need do not exist.”
Travelling through Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and Botswana, the author takes readers into that heart of where and how GDP is constructed, and with what degree of accuracy.
Read the rest of the review here at Africa Check.