Des revenus nationaux pour l'Afrique? La mesure du développement en Afrique occidentale française dans les années 1950

Bonnecase, Vincent

doi:10.1080/02255189.2014.881332

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 12 publications

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“…William Petty's seventeenth century Political Arithmetick systematized demographic and social statistics to tighten the grip of England's rulers over Ireland (Carroll, 2006;McCormick, 2009). In subsequent centuries, statistics remained wedded to colonial enterprises as tools to render subjugated societies legible and hence amenable to bureaucratic control (Appadurai, 1996;Bonnecase, 2014;Mitchell, 2002). These legacies remain visible in the contentious ways in which censuses pigeonhole people's ethnicity and race (Bowker & Leigh Star, 1999, p. 195ff;Conk, 1987;Loveman, 2014;Nobles, 2000;Petersen, 1987;Thompson, 2016).…”

Section: Statistics and Economic Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Economic statistics as political artefacts

Mügge

2020

Review of International Political Economy

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Macroeconomic statistics simultaneously shape and try to capture the political economy we study. Their biases mold social and political dynamics; they also infect academic and policy analysis. Political economy can both benefit from and advance an understanding of economic statistics as political artefacts. To help unlock that potential, this article builds on scholarship dispersed across disciplines and highlights three points. First, a binary debate that either acclaims or vilifies economic data is misdirected. Indispensable for public policy, quantification is neither good nor bad per se; the question is what its specific ramifications are. Second, macroeconomic statistics have been built around an ideal of white male factory work for wages. The further economic activity is removed from that image, the more statistics misrepresent or ignore it, with systematic biases as a result. Third, the real-world impact of statistics always depends on how they are understood, used, and subverted. It hinges on statistical practices, not just on abstract measurement approaches. As political economists we are political agents when we define, and reproduce, our object of study. We face both an analytical and a normative imperative to work with and towards statistics that do justice to the world and the people in it.

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Section: Statistics and Economic Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

Economic statistics as political artefacts

Mügge

2020

Review of International Political Economy

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Étudier l'Afrique des grands nombres

Samuel

2016

Annales

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Résumé Les travaux de Morten Jerven offrent une mise en perspective historique des techniques employées par les administrations nationales et les organisations internationales pour mettre en nombre et analyser la croissance des économies africaines. Selon lui, les réalités économiques et sociales nationales échappent largement aux travaux des statisticiens et des économistes depuis le début de l’ajustement structurel. L’informalisation des économies, la faiblesse des institutions statistiques et le manque de rigueur méthodologique des experts internationaux auraient conduit à la production de fictions statistiques. Les analyses de M. Jerven remettent en question les récits produits par l’histoire économique quantitative, comme l’existence d’une supposée faillite économique africaine depuis 1960. Elles interpellent aussi la sociologie de la quantification en mettant en lumière des cas nationaux où les calculs de la croissance seraient aléatoires. Mais son approche souffre de plusieurs faiblesses. Alors que ses premiers travaux reposaient sur des études de cas nationaux détaillées, l’auteur s’est récemment concentré sur la critique des discours produits à l’échelle du continent, les comparaisons internationales et les études économétriques, sur la croissance en particulier. Son travail s’est éloigné d’une ethnographie fine des chiffres et a fait de la dénonciation des récits continentaux son fil rouge. Ce glissement l’empêche de penser finement la place des chiffres dans les sociétés, la pluralité des positions et des modes d’action qu’ils engagent, ou encore les trajectoires historiques singulières dans lesquelles les calculs de la croissance africaine s’insèrent.

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Studying Africa's Large Numbers

Samuel

2016

Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales

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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.

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Des revenus nationaux pour l'Afrique? La mesure du développement en Afrique occidentale française dans les années 1950

Cited by 6 publications

References 12 publications

Economic statistics as political artefacts

Economic statistics as political artefacts

Étudier l'Afrique des grands nombres

Studying Africa's Large Numbers

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