I am a visiting scholar at "Les Afriques dans le monde" at Sciences Po Bordeaux in the spring term 2015. This event is public and free, online it is organized by Vincent Bonnecasse - who contributed a chapter in my recent edited volume. There...
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Category: Poor Numbers
Podcast: How poor numbers undermine the fight against poverty
It is two years since Poor Numbers was published, prescription and I had a nice conversation with Tom Paulson and Gabe Spitzer at Humanosphere. You can listen to the podcast here. We talked about the importance of getting good evidence, but also on the...
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Overcoming Obstacles to Doing Business in Sub-Saharan Africa
I am invited to offer my comments by Aubrey Hubry who argues: that inadequate infrastructure, there lack of market data, pills and poor policy implementation impede investment in Africa, healing despite growing opportunities to do so profitably The event takes place at the Atlantic...
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Without a statistical revolution, Africa’s renaissance is built on shaky ground
That is the title of a summary of the debates on the current African growth data written up by Ian Fraser. He is a financial journalist and the author of Shredded: Inside RBS: The Bank that Broke Britain- read the post in QFinance here.
What if everything we know about poor countries’ economies is totally wrong?
The results of a phone interview with Dylan Matthews at VOX. Read the full interview here.
Whose numbers?
That's the title of an article written by Adewale Maja-Pearce. He takes stock of the debate on Poor Numbers (between me and some representatives from some statistical offices) - and relates it to the problems of counting people in Nigeria - well worth a...
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Five reasons why African growth is slower than the data tell you
One of the things my book Poor Numbers suggested, tadalafil was that the rise of Africa might not be as impressive as the data tells you. The African Development Bank responded by saying there was nothing to worry about: the rise of Africa was...
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Are Development Statistics Manipulable ?
That is the question we explore in a new paper I have written with Andrew Kerner and Alison Beatty. Both political scientist at University of Michigan. Most of you would know that there is a GDP per capita threshold that determines whether you are...
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Is the FT Nit-Piketty?
The saga on the data problems in Piketty's book continues. Giles responds to the debate that has been unfolding, and notes that the academic community has as a whole been rather forgiving of Piketty, but that in Giles' view: Academic economists have got themselves...
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Economic data ‘came out of thin air’
No, this is not another reflection from my research on economic data on African economies, but the allegations by Chris Giles in the Financial Times against the inequality data used in Thomas Piketty's bestselling book. Giles shows that Piketty has indeed made some questionable...
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