Does economics have an ‘Africa problem’?

Abstract

There has been increasing interest on the apparent underrepresentation of African-based scholars in economics scholarship on Africa. Much of this debate, however, proceeds with little by way of evidence in demonstrating whether such an underrepresentation actually exists in the first place. In this paper, I look at the patterns of authorship over the period 2005–2015 in ‘leading’ economics journals that publish regularly on Africa. I find that, on average, only 25 per cent of the journal articles published on Africa had at-least one African-based author over this period. Further, I find that whereas the journals I consider dedicate about 30 per cent of their content on Africa, only 3 per cent of their editorial boards are based on the continent. These patterns likely account for the dismal state of the discipline’s knowledge about the continent.

Keywords:

• economics
• diversity
• knowledge production
• Africa
• representation

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the following for useful comments and suggestions: participants to the 2016 Fall semester of the African Studies Workshop at Harvard University, participants at the Researching and Teaching African Politics Workshop held at Smith College in May 2017, participants at the 2017 WISH seminar series hosted at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, participants at the African Perspectives on Global Corruption workshop held in Johannesburg in February 2017, Bernadette Mwansa Mushinge, Susan Cook, Nathan Nunn, Melusi Nkomo, Mekonnen Firew Ayano, Keith Breckenridge and Sean M. Muller. The author would also like to thank WISER and the Center for African Studies at Harvard University, where major portions of this work were undertaken, for hosting me.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Mkandawire (2015) has compiled a list of scholarship on Africa that is in this vein.

2 This is the conclusion of an influential survey of the literature on African economic performance by Collier and Gunning (1999).

3 I have elsewhere made informal observations on the online blog Africa is a country (see Chelwa, 2015).

4 Some of the prominent African-American economists spearheading this are Duke University’s William Darity and Darrick Hamilton of Ohio State University who have proposed ‘Stratification Economics’ as an alternative framework for understanding racial inequality in the United States (see Darity et al., 2015).

5 See Bassier (2016); Chelwa (2016); Prescod-Weinstein (2015)

6 See more here: https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.journals.simple.html

7 Notwithstanding the standard criticisms levelled at impact factors as a measure of influence. See ‘Hate journal impact factors? New study gives you one more reason’. Science Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/hate-journal-impact-factors-new-study-gives-you-one-more-reason

8 I abstract from the common practice of splitting up the continent into North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.

9 The North America classification covers both the United States of America and Canada. The classification ‘other’ refers to all institutions not based in either Africa, North America or Europe.

10 In a similar exercise but looking at politics scholarship on Africa, Briggs and Weathers (2016) use a similar method to classify authorship based on similar practicalities.

11 See: http://wbro.oxfordjournals.org/.

12 Although, it appears that economics is unique in this respect. Author names on multi-authored papers in economics tend to be arranged alphabetically in contrast to other disciplines where ordering is presumably based on contribution. One study put the estimate for the prevalence of alphabetic ordering in five leading economics journals (none of which are considered in this paper) at 85 per cent (Engers et al., 1999).

13 One critique of this comparison is that I am comparing a dynamic average with a static one. That is, I am comparing an average taken over 10 years with one from a single year. But even if we limited the dynamic average to papers published in 2015 or in the two or three years leading up to 2015, the conclusion would still remain. If anything, things would worsen by this rough criterion of ‘fairness’.

14 See the Special Issue on ‘African industrialization’ edited by McMillan and Heady (2014).

15 The book featured prominently on Chris Blattman’s ‘Political economy of development course’ at Columbia University. Blattman considers the book to be ‘one of [his] favourite books on African Political Economy’. See: http://chrisblattman.com/2007/12/09/dear-donors-please-stop-helping-us/

16 This narrowness of research focus is also evident in the ‘new development economics’ literature (see Chelwa, 2020).

17 Branko Milanovic ‘My take on the Acemoglu-Robinson critique of Piketty’. Retrieved from http://glineq.blogspot.com/2014/08/my-take-on-acemoglu-robinson-critique.html.

18 This is often the response that I have received from Northern economists when I have presented this paper. One Northern economist went so far as to ask me whether there were any economists at the University of Zambia, a university that has an economics department and has trained many economists including the author of this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Grieve Chelwa

Grieve Chelwa is an Inaugural Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute on Race and Political Economy at the New School. At the time of publication, he was winding down his appointment as a Senior Lecturer in economics at the University of Cape Town. Dr Chelwa has wide-ranging research interests around the broad theme of the discipline of economics and how it is studied and researched on the African continent.