An uneven statistical topography: the political economy of household budget surveys in late colonial Ghana, 1951–1957

Abstract

Abstract This paper reconstructs the history of household budget surveys in late colonial Ghana. It is argued that the household budgets institutionalised an “uneven statistical topography”. This unevenness comprises a spatial and a conceptual dimension. The former refers to the choice of the sampling locations, closely mirroring the uneven will of the state to exercise control over different parts of the country. The latter refers to the fact that household budget surveys incorporated different cognitive tools and served different aims depending on what the government envisaged as its political and economic agenda in the surveyed areas.

Résumé Cette recherche s'intéresse à l'histoire des enquêtes portant sur le budget des ménages à la fin de la période coloniale au Ghana. Elle affirme que les budgets des ménages ont institutionnalisé une « topographie statistique irrégulière », qui comprend une dimension spatiale et une dimension conceptuelle. La dimension spatiale porte sur le choix des endroits étudiés, qui reflétait la volonté de l’État de contrôler certaines régions du pays. La dimension conceptuelle fait référence au fait que les variables et la façon de les mesurer différaient d'une enquête à l'autre selon les objectifs poursuivis par l'agenda politique et économique du gouvernement dans les régions où les enquêtes étaient menées.

Keywords:

• household budget surveys
• Ghana
• Gold Coast
• decolonisation
• politics of statistics

Acknowledgements

Previous versions of this paper were presented at the conference “African Economic Development: Measuring Success and Failure”, Simon Fraser University (18–20 April 2013) and at the Graduate Thesis Workshop of the Economic History Department, London School of Economics and Political Science (1 May 2013). Besides the organisers and participants to these workshops, the author would like to thank for insightful comments Lars Boerner, Federico D'Onofrio and an anonymous referee. Special thanks to Leigh Gardner and Mary Morgan, my PhD advisors, and to Morten Jerven. The usual disclaimer applies. Financial support from the Economic History Society, which contributed to fund the archival research for this paper, is gratefully acknowledged. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude towards the LSE British Library of Political and Economic Science, the Public Records Office (London), and the Public Records and Archives Administration Department (Accra branch) for the permission to reproduce their material, and to their staff for the kind help offered over the course of this research.

Biographical note

Gerardo Serra is a PhD student in the Department of Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests are the history of economics, colonial and post-colonial African economic history, and the political economy of development and planning.

Notes

1. This literature is too vast to be summarised here. Recent influential works include Herbst (2000), Mkandawire (2001), Young (1994) and Bayart (2009).

2. On the other hand it should be noted that the knowledge that Hayek thought relevant for the construction of a “rational economic order” could not be strictly quantified: “the sort of knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form” (Hayek 1945, 524).

3. In his influential history of statistics, Porter (1995, xi) wrote that “geographical limitations are perhaps less forgivable than the temporal ones, and the history of colonialism, of international organisations and of centrally planned economies all provide extremely rich material for the history of quantification”. There is little doubt that Africa could provide a valuable collection of case studies to develop the lines of research suggested by Porter.

4. Throughout the paper “Gold Coast” and “Ghana” will be used interchangeably.

5. For a broad overview of the scope and breadth of recent historical research on decolonisation, see the articles collected in Le Sueur (2003).

6. An excellent example of this approach in relation to family expenditure surveys in the United States is Stapleford (2007).

7. Although the last two papers were published after independence, the beginning of the actual surveys took place before that date.

8. Table 1 excludes a small survey that was realised in 1951–1952 in a selection of villages in the Akwapim area. While certainly it was not published in the Statistical and Economic Papers of the Office of the Government Statistician, unfortunately the author has not even been able to find a draft or an unpublished copy in the Ghanaian archives. What is known about it is only that “the scale of the enquiry was too small to field [sic] quantitative results, but it provided a valuable indication of the items which could be reliably recorded in such enquiries” (Ghana Central Bureau of Statistics 1961, 2).

9. For further discussion, see Iliffe 1987 (especially Chap. 11), and Cooper (2002, Chap. 5).

10. A classic account of this is Hill (1986, Chap. 7). Similar problems were faced by colonial economists attempting to construct national income accounts. Phyllis Deane, for example, wrote about her fieldwork in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia): “The principal difficulty in surveying was that the sleeping household, the producing household and the spending household all represented different combinations and permutations within one wide family group” (quoted in Morgan 2011, 313).

11. Other conceptual problems experienced in designing the surveys discussed in the minutes of the statistical conference included the pervasive presence of retribution in kind, differences among tribes in patterns of income and expenditures, the communal holding of capital and items such as bicycles and clothing, the lack of understanding of the purpose of budget enquiries and the high labour turnover (“Minutes of Conference of Statisticians of Countries in Africa … ”, PRO CO 1078/1, 33–36 [original typescript pages]).

12. As rightly pointed out by Maas and Morgan (2012, 15): “Social statistics and classifications are always the outcome of strategic interactions that are politically loaded”. In a most fascinating work, Roger J. Bowden (1989) has gone as far as to construct a series of game theoretical models to represent the strategies involved in the creation of statistical information. While further research is needed to explore the role played by observers in shaping the strategic interaction with the observed subjects and establishing trust in the making of African statistics, there are studies which deal with this problem with reference to other geographical contexts. D'Onofrio (2012) for example addresses it in the context of the making of agricultural statistics in early twentieth-century Italy.

13. Thanks to an anonymous referee for bringing this valuable source to my attention.

14. Indeed, the practice of self-reporting has serious repercussions on statistical accuracy. For a study of this aspect in the context of American household surveys see Stapleford (2012).

15. This can be seen even more clearly in the map presented in Ghana Central Bureau of Statistics (1961, v).

16. A recent historical assessment largely confirms Raeburn's view: “This area has a history of chronic malnutrition and enduring poverty, even if it has not suffered massive famine mortality” (Destombes 1999, 4).

17. This does not imply that there was no attempt whatsoever to develop the Northern Territories. For example, in 1950 the colonial administration established the Gonja Development Corporation to increase food output and mechanise agricultural production (Miracle and Seidman 1968, 5).

18. This is an oversimplified, shortened version of the story. For extensive discussion of the politics of decolonisation in the Gold Coast the best departure point probably remains the classic work by D. Austin (1970).

19. The postcolonial history of Ghana presents a counterexample. The devaluation of the cedi in 1971 under Kofi Abrefa Busia, making the food consumed in the towns more expensive, led to wide discontent and eventually to the fall of the government and the seizure of power by the military (Bates 1981, 31).

20. It should be noted that attempts at measuring income and expenditures did not exhaust the range of statistical enquiries conducted in urban areas. In 1955, for example, the Ministry of Industries prepared a survey of industrial enterprises in Accra. The category “industrial enterprises” in this case was not confined to industrial plants, but included economic activities as different as laundries, mechanical repair shops, bakeries and shoe repair establishments. The survey itself simply consisted in a list of enterprises classified according to sector and the number of persons employed by each (“Accra Survey, 27 June–30 July”, PRAAD RG 7/1/359, 1[archivist's page number]).

21. The low expenditures observed in Akuse was also derived from the fact that the survey had been conducted “about two months before the beginning of Christmas expenditure” and thus “people were saving in preparation for the festive season” (Gold Coast Office of the Government Statistician 1956b, 12). While some recent historical work (Andersson 2002) has pointed out that the postcolonial division between “urban” and “rural” can be traced back, among other things, to the inheritance of a conceptual apparatus developed by the colonial administrations, further research is needed in uncovering the role of statistics in this process.

22. The production of economic surveys in the cocoa producing areas became in the same years an increasingly important object of study at the Economics Research Division of the University College of the Gold Coast (later University of Ghana). See for example Hill (1957) and McGlade (1957).

23. However, the issues that led to the institution of the Cocoa Marketing Board can be traced back to the consequences of the Great Depression, the cocoa hold ups of 1937–1938 and wartime measures on cocoa production and exports. For further discussion of the constitution of the Cocoa Marketing Board see Meredith (1988) and Alence (2001).

24. For further discussion on this and the role of the CPP in mobilising rural discontent see Danquah (1994).

25. A propaganda leaflet of the same year stated: “Ashanti produces more cocoa than the colony. IS THERE ANY COCOA IN THE NORTHERN TERITORRIES [sic]? NO! Why should Government tax cocoa farmers to develop the country in which Ashantis suffer most?” (quoted in Allman 1990, 266).

26. For a detailed exploration of the relationship between Nkrumah's regime and the chiefs, see the excellent study by Rathbone (2000).

27. Furthermore, specific crops presented additional problems. In spite of its crucial importance as a staple food in the West African diet, cassava was extremely difficult to count because, being a tuber, it was buried underground. Hill (1986, 34) notes that cassava “is often cultivated in tiny plots and in mixtures so that no West African country can have the faintest idea of how much is produced”.

28. For a review of the scope of the crops statistics produced by colonial West African marketing boards, see Bauer (1954).

29. A crop movement survey, including both vehicle and lorry checks, was then in fact organised between 1957 and 1958 (Ghana Central Bureau of Statistics 1961, 59).

30. For an extensive discussion of the history of the making of the Ashanti cocoa economy, see G. Austin's book, especially chapters 7 and 15. The study of credit was already a feature of surveys in the cocoa producing areas that preceded the formation of the Office of the Government Statistician. See for example Beckett ([1944] 1979, Chap. 5 and 6).

31. Similar findings were observed in postcolonial studies. Shortly after independence the amount of loans provided by the Cocoa Purchasing Company in Ahafo amounted to almost 7 per cent; more than 85 per cent was still provided by local farmers and relatives (G. Austin 2005, 389).

32. A more detailed classification of “informal” credit sources to cocoa farmers is presented by McGlade (1957, 14) in her survey of the Cape Coast area. Out of the 48 creditors identified, 32 were farmers with no other occupation, seven farmers with other occupations and four were cocoa brokers.