Morten Jerven receives criticism for calling into question the reliability of economic data from African countries that foreign consultants use to analyze African economies. The data often contains large margins of error and makes misleading conclusions about countries' economic stability and growth. Jerven argues that the data misleads outsiders' understanding of African economics by being based on wrong assumptions and overgeneralizations. For example, data was cited to claim an emerging African middle class, but closer examination shows this is not really the case. Jerven believes development economists should stop advocating specific economic models and instead recognize that a 'one size fits all' approach based on European history does not apply to diverse African contexts and has been damaging.
Morten Jerven receives criticism for calling into question the reliability of economic data from African countries that foreign consultants use to analyze African economies. The data often contains large margins of error and makes misleading conclusions about countries' economic stability and growth. Jerven argues that the data misleads outsiders' understanding of African economics by being based on wrong assumptions and overgeneralizations. For example, data was cited to claim an emerging African middle class, but closer examination shows this is not really the case. Jerven believes development economists should stop advocating specific economic models and instead recognize that a 'one size fits all' approach based on European history does not apply to diverse African contexts and has been damaging.
Morten Jerven receives criticism for calling into question the reliability of economic data from African countries that foreign consultants use to analyze African economies. The data often contains large margins of error and makes misleading conclusions about countries' economic stability and growth. Jerven argues that the data misleads outsiders' understanding of African economics by being based on wrong assumptions and overgeneralizations. For example, data was cited to claim an emerging African middle class, but closer examination shows this is not really the case. Jerven believes development economists should stop advocating specific economic models and instead recognize that a 'one size fits all' approach based on European history does not apply to diverse African contexts and has been damaging.
In an attempt to dismantle our [Western & European] predominate thinking about African economics, Morten Jerven receives much flak in the economics field not only from Western colleagues but from individuals in charge of statistics in African countries working within the African National Accountants organization. Jerven critically calls into question the reliability and accuracy of trade figures and data that many European and other foreign consultants have marked African countries to be pulling in annually. In addition the statistical surface of data, which only gives a snapshot of specific economic cases during specific periods of time, allows for a large margin of error in making misleading conclusions about the reality of a places economic stability. Initially, statistical offices located around the continent like that of Zambias reached out to Jerven angered and upset that he would further exacerbate the international problem of predominate thinking toward African economics by calling into question the legitimacy of their data. In fact, Pali Lehohla, the South African Statistician-General made a statement that said Jerven suggested that Africa misleads the world with poor numbers when in reality Jervens message was that poor numbers in data actually misleads the world about African economics. Specifically the data, which may seem objective in nature, are often based on wrong and misleading assumptions and correlations, which ultimately lead to grand generalizations. The source of this skewed data is due to the fact that socio-economic realities are more than number crunching, referring to how GDP can be greatly misleading about a countries actual growth. Jervens example of how data can create a reality is the recent hype or rumor that a middleclass has emerged through recent developments in the continent. However, with some scrutiny a closer look reveals that a middle-class is still really non-existent in the way the data made it seem there would be. Jervens solution to this problem is "for economics to be relevant to economies, development economists should stop acting as advocates for very specific models of economic development" (Jerven, pg 131). In other words, the one size fits all econometrics approach to African economics was a gigantic mistake and the European bias problem already in existence only made it worse as European economists tried using their own economic history to predict future African economic climates. Not only was using European economic history little use, it was very damaging to the economies in Africa under growth.