Measuring African Development

<p>The chief economist for the World Bank's Africa region Shanta Devarajan delivered a devastating assessment of the capacity of African states to measure development in his 2013 article Africa's Statistical Tragedy. Is there a statistical tragedy unfolding in Africa now? If so it becomes important to examine the roots of the problem as far as the provision of statistics in poor economies is concerned. This book on measuring African development in the past and in the present draws on the historical experience of colonial French West Africa Ghana Sudan Mauritania and Tanzania and the more contemporary experiences of Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The authors each reflect on the changing ways statistics represent African economies and how they are used to govern them.</p><p>This book was published as a special issue of the <em>Canadian Journal of Development Studies</em>.</p>