“The African Growth Miracle,” A. Young (2013)

Alwyn Young, well known for his empirical work on growth, has finally published his African Growth paper in the new issue of the JPE. Africa is quite interesting right now. Though it is still seen by much of the public as a bit of a basket case, the continent seems to be by-and-large booming. At least to the “eye test”, it has been doing so for some time now, to some extent in the 1990s but much more so in the 2000s. I remember visiting Kigali, Rwanda for the first time in 2008; this is a spotless, law-abiding city with glass skyscrapers downtown housing multinational companies. Not what you may have expected!

What is interesting, however, is that economic statistics have until very recently still shown African states growing much slower than other developing countries. A lot of economic data from the developing world is of poor quality, but Young notes that for many countries, it is literally non-existent: those annual income per capita tables you see in UN data and elsewhere involve pretty heroic imputation. Can we do better? Young looks at an irregular set of surveys from 1990 to 2006, covering dozens of poor countries, called the Demographic and Health Survey. This survey covers age, family size, education level and some consumption (“do you have a bicycle?”, “do you have a non-dirt floor?”). What you see immediately is that, across many items, the growth rate in consumption in African states surveyed more or less matches the growth rate in non-African developing countries, despite official statistics suggesting the non-African states have seen private consumption growing at a much faster clip.

Can growth in real consumption be backed out of such statistics? The DHS is nice in that it, in some countries and years, includes wages. The basic idea is the following: consumption of normal goods rises with income, and income rises with education, so consumption of normal goods should rise with education. I can estimate very noisy Engel curves linking consumption to education, and using the parts of the sample where wage data exists, a Mincerian regression with a whole bunch of controls gives us some estimate of the link between a year of education and income: on average, it is on the order of 11 percent. We now have a method to go from consumption changes to implied mean education levels to real consumption changes. Of course, this estimate is very noisy. Young uses a properly specified maximum likelihood function with random effects to show how outliers or noisy series should be weighted when averaging estimates of real income changes using each individual product; indeed, a simple average of the estimated real consumption growth from each individual product gives a wildly optimistic growth rate, so such econometric techniques are quite necessary.

What, then, does this heavy lifting give us? Real consumption in countries in the African sample grew 3.4% per household per annum in 1990-2006, versus 3.8% in developing countries outside Africa. This is contra 1% in African and 2% in non-African countries, using the same sample of countries, in other prominent international data sources. Now, many of these countries are not terribly far from subsistence, so it is impossible for most African states to have been growing at this level throughout the 70s and 80s as well, but at least for the 90s, consumption microdata suggests a far rosier past two decades on the continent than many people imagine. Clever.

Final working paper (IDEAS version). I am somehow drawing a blank on the name of the recent book covering the poor quality of developing world macro data – perhaps a commenter can add this for me.

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