When I started studying economics as an undergraduate at MIT in the early 1990s, development economics was at best a peripheral field, and at worst an embarrassing interest to admit to. When I applied to graduate school, and listed development economics, political economy and economic history as my three fields of interest, a terrified letter-writer - who shall remain nameless - urged me to substitute them with game theory or macro. (I didn’t.) An interest in African development was even more transgressive. Why study a place where our economic theories don’t seem to work well? Tom MaCurdy of Stanford summed up this line of thinking (during a post-job talk dinner back in February 2000) when he memorably told me “There’s no economics in Africa.” In case you’re wondering, I didn’t get the Stanford job.
Well folks, things have finally started to change. In the past month I’ve been at two high-profile, well-attended and intellectually exciting academic conferences devoted to African economic development. The first was hosted by the new NBER Africa group back in February. This group has gotten generous funding from the Gates Foundation to seed interesting research projects tackling core issues in African development. So far the questions folks are asking have been exciting - what impact do cell phones have on the functioning of African markets and governments? how can we best promote post-war economic and political recoveries? how have agricultural commodity price movements affected growth rates?. Over the next few years these projects will start yielding important results.
The second conference took place at U.C. Davis two weeks ago, sponsored by their Center for the Evolution of the Global Economy (CEGE). The papers and discussants covered a wide range of topics, including the historical legacies of slavery, impediments to manufacturing growth, and my presentation on household valuation for clean water and improved child health in rural Kenya.
These papers are just the tip of the iceberg. Many other academics, as well as the World Bank, Center for Global Development, and others institutions, have helped bring the study of African development into the economics mainstream over the past five years or so. It’s about time!
