Abstract
ABSTRACT While interest in African economic history has grown rapidly in recent years, the continent’s post-colonial past remains understudied. This is at least in part because of the decline and fragmentation in the publication of economic statistics after decolonization, which has limited the type and breadth of quantitative analysis that can be undertaken. Nonetheless, this note argues that there are comparatively untapped post-colonial data sources that could enrich the study of the continent's economic history. The note surveys some of these sources and data repositories and provides advice, based on the author’s own experiences, on how to utilize them.
Highlights
This note discusses some of the reasons for this lacuna in the African economic history literature, focusing on the changing nature of statistical publications after independence
Many important recent economic ruptures that have influenced development paths, from the terms of trade shocks of the 1970’s, economic crises of the 1980’s, structural adjustment reforms of the 1990’s, to deindustrialisation and later recovery in the 2000’s, have received comparatively little attention from economic historians. These topics are studied by economists and political scientists, some with a strong understanding of the continent’s economic history no doubt, but who are not aiming to explain these processes of economic change using the economic historian’s frameworks and toolkits, or to explicitly place them in historical context
10 Note that because the focus is on sources that allow analysis of change over time, it does not cover the many recent innovations in socioeconomic measurement, using for instance satellite imagery to measure light intensity or housing quality, or new measures of values and opinions, such as the Afrobarometer
Summary
Many important recent economic ruptures that have influenced development paths, from the terms of trade shocks of the 1970’s, economic crises of the 1980’s, structural adjustment reforms of the 1990’s, to deindustrialisation and later recovery in the 2000’s, have received comparatively little attention from economic historians These topics are studied by economists and political scientists, some with a strong understanding of the continent’s economic history no doubt, but who are not aiming to explain these processes of economic change using the economic historian’s frameworks and toolkits, or to explicitly place them in historical context. It seeks merely to provide some possible starting points for researchers interested in quantitative analysis Sub-Saharan Africa’s recent past.
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