The race between education and technology The historical co-evolution of technology, schooling, and labour market institutions, also known as the ‘race between education and technology’, is a central theme in the literature on modern economic growth and inequality. The idea of a ‘race’, as Jan Tinbergen (1975) called it, refers to three central features of the modern economy: continuous technological change that requires flexible education systems to equip labour forces with the knowledge and skills to work with frontier technologies, and to keep the cycle of innovations going. While in-depth ..read more

Health and wealth are positively correlated across a range of dimensions, but the causal mechanisms remain unclear. This is because health and wealth are inextricably bound up with each other, making it challenging to disentangle cause and effect. Consequently, the question of how later-life outcomes respond to the gain or loss of wealth and how persistent these effects are over time remains open. Experimentation is difficult since it is not possible to randomize people’s wealth on a large enough scale to test the relationship between wealth and health. Traditional quasi-experimental designs u ..read more

Among the world’s most powerful cultural transformations in modern history has been the rapid expansion of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa. While Christians made up barely 5% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population in 1900, the region has risen to be predominantly (57%) Christian today, boasting the most committed Christians worldwide (The Economist 2015). By 2060, Africa will be home to 42% of Christians worldwide, by far the largest concentration globally (Todd et al. 2018). Christian expansion was initially facilitated by Christian missionary efforts who throughout the colonial era provided t ..read more

Africans on the global migration scene: past and present African migration figures prominently in global headlines, and often not in a positive light. The massacre in the Spanish enclave of Melilla in North Africa on June 24, 2022, is only one catastrophe in a long list of fatal attempts to cross into Europe. Large numbers of African migrants also work in Qatar and other Gulf countries, under conditions that came under heavy international scrutiny in the context of the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Meanwhile, growing attention is paid the long-lasting legacies of historical forced migration of enslaved ..read more

Economist John Williamson coined the term “Washington Consensus” in 1989, in reference to a set of 10 market-oriented policies that were popular among Washington-based policy institutions, as policy prescriptions for improving economic performance in Latin-American countries. These policies centered around fiscal discipline, market-oriented domestic reforms, and openness to trade and investment. In African countries, the Washington Consensus inspired market-based reforms prescribed by international financial institutions (IFIs) like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), und ..read more

Linking fertility decline to financial inclusion Kenya experienced a steep decline in fertility from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s. Fertility reduction then stalled in the mid-1990s coinciding with a reduction in support for family planning programmes, but resumed with vigor in the early 2000s at the same time as M-PESA (mobile phone-based payment transfers) and other financial innovations were spreading rapidly in Kenya (Figure 1). Nevertheless, Kenya’s total fertility rate remains high in relative terms (3.42 as of 2019). There are reasons to think that these two trends are related, giv ..read more

Research on African economic performance has often focused on the question of why Africa has underperformed other regions. The only available data on Africa’s long-run economic performance began in 1950, and showed that most African economies had grown little between 1950 and 2000. Conversely, a resurgence of economic growth since 2000 prompted new questions about what changed and whether Africa had finally turned a corner. In other regions, historical national accounts have extended our knowledge of patterns of growth and development over centuries into the past (Broadberry 2021). In a recent ..read more

The International Labour Organisation was established in 1919 to address some of the biggest challenges affecting wage earners worldwide. The ILO introduced major conventions and recommendations targeted at improving the socio-economic conditions of workers in the colonial empires, beginning with the Forced Labour Convention of 1930. Many studies have concluded, however, that the ILO’s general influence on labour policies in colonial Africa was weak for three reasons (Bellucci & Eckert, 2019; Maul 2019; Cooper, 1996). First, the ILO was incapable of policing its standards in the member-stat ..read more

South Africa’s development path is often regarded as unusual in both global and regional context, although scholars disagree on when and why it diverged. Some have argued that South Africa’s exceptionalism was a consequence of Apartheid policies, starting after the 1920s (Ross, Mager & Nasson 2011). In a recent paper, I argue that South Africa’s exceptionalism has deeper historical roots (Gwaindepi 2021). Using a newly created fiscal dataset, I cast the Cape Colony into comparative fiscal capacity debates to probe how the Cape compares to other 19th-century British settler colonies. I show ..read more

While sub-Saharan Africa has a poor and erratic record of economic growth over the long 20th century, its sustained expansion of education is beyond dispute.  Average educational attainment increased from 0.2 years of schooling in 1900 to 2.3 in 1970 and 5.7 in 2010 (Barro & Lee 2015). Despite this significant progress, SSA’s educational expansion was highly uneven, with certain regions and particular sections of the population benefiting earlier and more than others. Gender was a major fault line, as boys benefitted disproportionally from emerging educational opportunities. Sub-Sahar ..read more