African economic development: Evidence, theory, policy
African economic development: Evidence, theory, policy
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非洲经济发展：证据、理论、政策
DOI：
10.1093/afraf/adab014
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发表时间：
2021
期刊：
影响因子：
2.8
通讯作者：
D. Booth
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
D. Booth
以现代社会科学所能提供的最好的见解和方法来处理非洲经济发展问题，已经有许多年了。克莱默、森德和奥克贝在这方面树立了新的标准。他们从统计意识和多方法经济学的角度出发，针对对非洲发展前景的不合理的悲观情绪，以及由国际非政府组织和联合国机构等传播的naïve信念，即非洲的进步在某种程度上不受支配世界其他地方资本主义进步的规则的约束。这本书（由OUP的开放获取计划覆盖）有10章，分为四个部分。第一部分描述了背景，首先看了一下数据，并承诺消除发展经济学中传统“常识”的迷雾。这个短语指的是在正统、新古典经济学和“第三世界主义”发展理论这两种被认为是对立的传统之间，趋同政策建议的重要领域。第3章阐述了作者的观点，基于对各国在不同时空的不同经济表现的观察，提倡一种强有力的“可能性”，并对使用总体统计的传统方法持怀疑态度。第二部分详细论述了经济发展战略。第三章从卡尔多、卡莱茨基和赫希曼的思想中汲取灵感，强调国家主导的高投资比例的重要性；包括食品在内的工资商品成本在工业化中的关键作用（因此提高农村生产率非常重要）；应优先考虑面向全球市场的大规模就业密集型生产（尽管与联合国贸易和发展会议有关的贸易悲观主义）；以及“不平衡发展”（以及精心挑选的大型投资项目）的优点。埃塞俄比亚花卉农场的案例说明了一个特别有趣的论点，即农业综合企业的大规模技术先进生产可以获得收益
It is many years since the subject of African economic development has been treated with the best insights and methods that modern social science has to offer. Cramer, Sender, and Oqubay have set a new standard in this respect. Writing from the perspective of a statistically aware, multimethods economics, they take aim at both unjustified pessimism about Africa’s development prospects and the naïve belief—propagated by international non-governmental organizations and United Nations agencies among others—that progress in Africa is somehow exempt from the rules that have governed capitalist progress everywhere else in the world. The book (covered by OUP’s open access scheme) has 10 chapters, divided between four parts. Part I describes The Context, with a first look at the data and a commitment to clearing away the fog of conventional ‘common sense’in development economics. This phrase refers to the significant areas of convergent policy advice between the supposedly opposed traditions of orthodox, neoclassical economics on the one hand and ‘third worldist’development theory on the other. Setting out the authors’ stall, Chapter 3 advocates a robust ‘possibilism’based on the observation of countries’ varied economic performance across space and over time, and a sceptical take on conventional ways of using aggregate statistics. Part II gets into detail on Strategies of Economic Development. Three chapters take inspiration from the ideas of Kaldor, Kalecki, and Hirschman, stressing the importance of a high investment ratio led by the state; the crucial role in industrialization of the cost of wage goods, including food (hence the importance of raising rural productivity); the priority that should be given (despite the trade pessimism associated with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, UNCTAD) to large-scale employment-intensive production oriented to global markets; and the virtues of ‘unbalanced development’(and thus of the well-selected large investment project). A particularly interesting argument here, illustrated by the case of flower farms in Ethiopia, is that large-scale technologically advanced production in agribusiness can capture the gains