How large is Africa?
January 30th, 2012 § 5 Comments
I seem to be on a roll with the geographic posts these days – but this map, brought to my attention by Tom of A View From the Cave, was too cool not to share! Via Information is Beautiful.
A different look at global income inequality
May 11th, 2011 § 3 Comments
Something that has long struck me about modern discourses on international development is the idea that poverty is somehow shocking, an aberrance in our age of wealth. It’s not! Plenty of people in the world live in the way that humans have lived for most of history. If anything, it is the wealth of the developed West that is profoundly and ahistorically abnormal.
Worldmapper has some good maps of population and wealth through history that offer a bit of perspective on this topic. Data for year 1 CE was taken from Angus Maddison’s historical estimates of the world economy. Check out these maps of estimated population and wealth at this time:
Population, 1 CE (source)
Wealth, 1 CE (source)
You’ll note that the maps are virtually identical, reflecting the facts that per capita GDP (imputed to modern territories, as these states obviously didn’t exist in 1 CE) varied extremely little around the world. Maddison has estimated it at an average of $445 annually per person.
Now check out population and wealth in 2000:
Population, 2000 CE (source)
Wealth, 2002 CE (source)
Hello disparities! Latin America is the only region where wealth appears to have grown roughly commensurately with population. The US, Europe and Japan, of course, are looking a bit bloated, whilst most of sub-Saharan Africa appears to be doing worse (relative to the rest of the world) than it was 2000 years ago. Average global per capita GDP in 2000 was about $5200, meaning that even the massive population growth of the last two millennia has not prevented the world’s citizens from growing (on average) more than ten times as rich as they were in 1 CE.
It should go without saying that the conclusions one can actually draw from a set of maps drawn with imputed data is limited. However, I still find it useful to have a reminder that we shouldn’t assume the normalcy or inevitability of the world as we see it today.
Where are the Congo’s resources?
May 5th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Via Le Monde Diplo, here’s a very useful map:
Nigeria & the Anglican schism
April 30th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Whilst looking around on Worldmapper for my recent post on liberation theology in Africa, I found this map of the global distribution of Anglicans, which makes clear why the Church of Nigeria has played such a pivotal role in the potential schism in the Anglican Communion:
If you haven’t been following this debate, there’s a brief overview here. To generalize a bit, there’s a conservative-progressive split in the communion that roughly corresponds with Southern and Northern churches, and it intensified over the Episcopal Church in the USA’s ordination of an openly gay man as the Bishop of New Hampshire in 2003. I certainly think the ECUSA is on the right side of history on this point, but, as this thoughtful article from Killing the Buddha relates, African resistance to Northern theological hegemony is also tied in to historical legacies of colonialism and contemporary local-level struggles to expand the reach of the Anglican church. Just like everything else, there aren’t any easy answers.
What happened to African liberation theology?
April 22nd, 2011 § 5 Comments
I’ve been puzzling over the titular question for a few weeks now, ever since reading about the connection that Samuel Huntington drew between the evolving Catholic church (with regard to Vatican II and liberation theology) and democratization in Latin America. Liberation theology sprang up from the 1950s – 1970s as an intense critique of the church’s role in abetting oppression and poverty, of which there was plenty in both Latin America and Africa at the time – but whilst it left a lasting impression on both faith practices and (selon Huntington) politics in LatAm, it didn’t seem to spread across the Atlantic in any meaningful way. (The exception appears to be South Africa, where “liberation” had an unusually clearly defined sense.)
This might go back to the general debate over why Africans don’t protest more (see here and here), but I’m also wondering about the specific political facets of religious life in Africa that might have incentivized religious leaders not to adapt and adopt this type of faith-based social movement. Were organized faiths regularly co-opted by by the state during this period? Or did religious leaders & laypeople face the same incentives against rebellion as any other citizens? Science Encyclopedia offers some stylized facts about religion and the state in Africa, but nothing systematic enough to draw conclusions.
With regard to Catholicism specifically, January Makamba points out that this tradition was not nearly as deeply entrenched in Africa as it was in Latin America, which could be relevant if theologians are less likely to adopt new ideas across denominational lines (or across different faiths all together, given that there are estimated to be more Muslims than Christians in Africa). Check out Worldmapper’s depiction of the distribution of Catholics around the world:
For comparison, here’s a map of global population distribution:
Latin America clearly has a greater-than-proportional share of Catholics, although central and east Africa also appear to be holding their own, making it less immediately obvious that “lack of Catholicism” is a good explanatory variable. Thoughts and recommendations for further reading would be welcomed!
Resources & the ease of doing business in Africa
April 17th, 2011 § 3 Comments
Afrographique is well-worth checking out for its gorgeous representations of various African statistics. Take a look at this graph of foreign investment in 2009 (original post here):
Investment levels seem strongly correlated with natural resources (no surprise there), but don’t appear to have much relation to the ease of doing business in a country. Nigeria, Sudan, Angola, and the Republic of Congo are all major oil exporters, even though of the 46 African countries the World Bank included in its 2011 Doing Business rankings*, they were respectively rated #17, 25, 31 and 40. Chad, at #46, had more investment than Botswana at #3. And Somalia, a failed state that didn’t even make it into the Doing Business rankings, had only a touch less investment than vaunted reformer Rwanda. Fascinating stuff.
*Only the current year’s data are up on the Doing Business site, and some countries have shifted rankings between 2009 (for which we have investment data) and 2011 (the business rankings). For instance, I know that the DRC went from 183 of 183 in the world in Doing Business 2009 to a less whopping 175 of 183 in 2011. That said, with the exception of unusually rapid reformers such as Rwanda, I doubt the investment climate has changed that significantly (with the exception of political unrest) in most countries over the last two years.
The state of tertiary education in Africa
September 8th, 2010 § 5 Comments
It’s not looking so good, according to this graph showing gross spending* on higher ed in PPP terms, from Understanding Society:
It puts me in mind of a chapter from Easterly’s Elusive Quest for Growth, wherein he asks if it’s the case that African investment is low because there’s insufficient skilled labor on the continent – or whether Africans see few incentives for education when their job prospects on the other end are dim. The obvious vote is for both. See also Iyinoluwa Aboyeji on why the development industry should be funding universities in Africa rather than additional Centers for the Study of Development at Western universities, and Marginal Revolution for some interesting general thoughts on incentives for education in low-income countries.
*Thanks to Alison Cummins for pointing out that this is gross expenditure and not per capita!
