Economic Development in Africa and Europe: Reciprocal Comparisons

Abstract

Recent advances in historical national accounting have allowed for global comparisons of GDP per capita across space and time. Critics have argued that GDP per capita fails to capture adequately the multi-dimensional nature of welfare, and have developed alternative measures such as the human development index. Whilst recognising that these wider indicators provide an appropriate way of assessing levels of welfare, we argue that GDP per capita remains a more appropriate measure for assessing development potential, focussing on production possibilities and the sustainability of consumption. Twentieth-century Africa and pre-industrial Europe are used to show how such data can guide reciprocal comparisons to provide insights into the process of development on both continents.

Cliometrics: Past, Present, and Future

“…al. 2019, 2014, Broadberry and Gardner 2016, Broadberry, Custodis, and Gupta 2015 McCloskey 1976 p 438…”

Income Inequality in French West Africa: Building Social Tables for Pre-Independence Senegal and Ivory Coast

“…This might still be due to contact with the Europeans through the slave trade, but in such case colonialism played at most a secondary role in enrooting inequality as well as under-development (for a synthesis of the debate, Acemoglu and Robinson 2010; Bolt and Hillbom 2016) A quickly-expanding, recent literature on African economic history has gone a long way towards providing better estimates of key economic variables, like per-capita GDP, for many parts of the continent. Although much remains to be done, these studies are beginning to change the very empirical basis upon which discussion of the "African divergence" takes place (Prados de la Escosura 2012; Austin and Broadberry 2014;Broadberry and Gardner 2016). Long-term distributive dynamics, however, have been relatively neglected by this renaissance in African economic history, hence the debate about the origins of high inequality rages on.…”