If you have sat through more than two conferences and workshops on the post-2015 development agenda or the Sustainable Development Goals (or tracked #SDGs or #data2015 on Twitter) you will be aware that there is a certain repetition of ideas. The same soundbites are...
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Category: World Bank
Statistical Tragedy in Africa? Evaluating the Data Base for African Economic Development
On Monday, salve April 6, thumb 2015 - 10:00am to 11:30am the special issue in the Journal of Development Studies: Statistical Tragedy in Africa? Evaluating the Data Base for African Economic Development which I edited with Deborah Johnston is being launched at the Center...
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Africa and Economics. What’s the problem?
Sensitivity to local conditions? Check. World Bank Kenya got it covered. Right on cue, doctor the World Bank makes a contribution to the debate on whether Economics has an Africa problem (here and here). Several WBG Executive Directors are visiting Kenya from 16th -...
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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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Statistical Earthquakes
That's what Homi Kharas and Laurence Chandy calls it. They refer to the shifts that the new price data come from the International Comparison Program are causing to the poverty numbers. The new numbers are causing large revisions upwards and downwards for some country,...
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World poverty halved?
The implications from the new 2011 PPP benchmarks from the ICP numbers may mean a huge reduction in the poverty head count in the world. Sarah Dykstra, Charles Kenny and Justin Sandefur at the Center for Global Development draw some implications from thethe new...
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Someone robbed the databank (at the World Bank)
More specifically, Justin Sandefur (with Sarah Dykstra and Benjamin Dykstra) at the Center for Global Development have been running a script to get full access to the data in the Povcalnet database maintained at the World Bank (by Shaohua Chen; Prem Sangraula and Martin...
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New Afrobarometer results further question the ‘Africa rising’ narrative
In Poor Numbers I suggested that many African economies are not growing as fast as the official statistics will have us think, and that we know too little to judge what is happening actually to living standards and poverty in the aggregate. As John...
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Towards Better Economic Policy Making: Strengthening Africa’s Data
That's the title of the IMF seminar I am speaking at during the Annual Meetings of the IMF and World Bank this weekend. It takes place on Friday, October 11th, 11:30 am – 1:00pm in the Lisner Auditorium at George Washington University. As far...
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GDP in Ghana – Two lines
As I have discussed elsewhere (here, here and here), in 2010, Ghana changed its base year for GDP calculation from 1993 to 2006, and the cumulative effect of change in methods, base year and adding new data on economic activities meant that total GDP...
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