Africa's Statistical Tragedy

By Shanta Devarajan. 2013

229 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Demography, Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0ce21f905238aa22800513ba798c13fab1e26ef0

Citations in the corpus

• Big Data for Development: A Review of Promises and Challenges (2016, unknown): “In 2010 the surprised statisticians found that Ghana’s GDP was 62 % higher than previously thought (Devarajan, 2011).”
• Structural Change, Fundamentals and Growth: A Framework and Case Studies (2017, unknown): “14 Devarajan (2013) and Jerven and Johnston (2015). Like them, we think that the quality of national accounts data is intimately linked to Africa’s growth and prosperity.”
• The Changing Structure of Africa's Economies (2017, unknown): “For recent critiques of African data, see papers by Devarajan (2013) and Jerven and Johnston (2015). 4.”
• The Tyranny of Data? The Bright and Dark Sides of Data-Driven Decision-Making for Social Good (2016, unknown): “However, the scarcity of reliable key measures in developing countries represents a major challenge to researchers and policy-makers 1 , thus hampering efforts to target interventions effectively to areas of greatest need ( e.g. African countries) [26, 40].”
• The Political Economy of Bad Data: Evidence from African Survey and Administrative Statistics (2014, unknown): “There is a growing consensus among international observers that official statistics in many subSaharan African countries are woefully inadequate and unreliable (Jerven, 2013), what Devarajan (2013) calls a ‘statistical tragedy’.”
• Structural Transformation in Africa: Static Gains, Dynamic Losses (2015, unknown): “…foundations underlying GDP and employment estimates in various African countries are subject to large measurement error, and have referred to these weak fundamentals for growth and productivity analysis as ‘Africa’s statistical tragedy’ (Devarajan, 2013; Jerven, 2013; Jerven & Johnston, 2015).”