A statistical tragedy

An excellent and lengthy piece, Africa's Poor Numbers by Inquisitive Bird.  The subheading is:  How much do we really know about African state of affairs?

More recently, Devarajan (2013), then chief economist for Africa at the World Bank, described the state of affairs as “Africa's Statistical Tragedy”. Others call it Africa’s “data gap” (Adebisi & Lucero-Prisno, 2022). But perhaps the most well-known critical appraisal of Africa’s developmental statistics is Morten Jerven’s 2013 book Poor Numbers—the inspiration of the title of this piece.

As an economist, Jerven’s interest pertained to the production of GDP figures, the sort of numbers that are illustrated in the earlier graph. What methodology and data were used to produce those numbers? How reliable were the numbers?

In 2007, Jerven visited the statistical office responsible for Zambia’s national accounts. It was only with personal experience that the gravity of the situation truly revealed itself.

There were only three employees, and just one regularly in the office while he was visiting. No employee could account for how income estimates had been generated more than a decade ago. They lacked resources and staff. They lacked basic data. Many sectors of the economy had no usable data, or estimations were made based on a very small subset of the sector’s economy. Many numbers were functionally guesstimates with no underlying rigorous and reproducible methodology.

When he revisited in 2010, the situation was even worse. As he explains (Jerven, 2013):

“What happens if I disappear?” In 2010, I returned to Zambia and found that the national accounts now were prepared by one man alone. His question was not hypothetical, but one of real concern. Until very recently he had had one colleague, but that man was removed from the National Accounts Division to work on the 2010 population census. To make matters worse, lack of personnel in the section for industrial statistics and public finances meant that the only statistician left in the National Accounts Division was responsible for these data as well.

In total, he visited eight Sub-Saharan African countries, and had extensive e-mail correspondence with statistical offices in several others.1 The problems were by no means unique to Zambia. “Similar anecdotes could be told from research visits I have made to other countries in sub-Saharan Africa since 2007,” he writes. Nor is this problem contained to economic statistics.

As he points out, this statistical problem is not isolated to Africa but it is certainly concentrated there.

Statistical performance indicator (SPI) overall scores by country, 2020. Source: Dang et al. (2023)

Click to enlarge.

All very related to the "legibility of the state" discussed by James C. Scott in his, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.