Research Deserts and Oases: Evidence from 27 Thousand Economics Journal Articles on Africa*

Abstract

The distribution of economics research across Africa's 54 countries is highly uneven. I use a simple conceptual model and reduced‐form regressions with cross‐sectional, panel, and subnational data to explore the determinants of this distribution. Of the variation in research across countries, 93% can be explained by peacefulness, political institutions, international tourist arrivals, having English as an official language, and population. Within countries, research is concentrated in regions with higher income and large urban areas. Most research on African countries is context‐specific, so the lack of research in many countries and regions means a smaller potential evidence base for local policymakers.

Bridging the divide in energy policy research: Empirical evidence from global collaborative networks

“…The same is true for primary authors from India and Brazil. This is contrary to the findings of Porteous (2021) who concludes that population is the main explanatory variable of research interest on African countries. Both Brazil and India are countries with large populations and research on them by both national and foreign authors should be equally attractive.…”

“…Furthermore, we refer to "developing countries" in this section in order to characterise the literature, recognising that this is a commonly used term in energy research, whilst we prefer to refer to higher and lower income countries elsewhere.2 The search result can be found through the following link: https://www. webofscience.com/wos/woscc/summary/646770b3-315e-4b27-86a8-290577 a11b10-0061b916/relevance/1.3 In a study of why certain African countries are studied more than others(Porteous, 2021), finds that population explains 60% of the variation in number of articles published about a country. We control for population of country of study as a potential explanatory variable for interest in a country and, hence, an influential variable on number of citations an article receives.…”

African agricultural development: How are we contributing?

“…These countries contribute almost two thirds (63.4%) of the total number of papers. This differs somewhat from the analysis of all articles on Africa in the top five Economics journals (Porteous, 2017). There the five most frequently researched countries include South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Ethiopia, where these countries make up "only" 52% of this category of research in the top five journals.…”

Missing Evidence: Tracking Academic Data Use around the World

“…Previous research has highlighted gaps between countries in economic research output and noted that richer countries are the subject of more economic research. For instance, Robinson, Hartley, and Schneider (2006), Das et al (2013), andPorteous (2022) examine which countries are studied most by economists using the EconLit database. Cameron, Mishra, and Brown (2016) and Sabet and Brown (2018) extend this to note that impact evaluations are highly uneven across countries as well.…”