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Governing and Doing Economics the African Way

Writer: Fatoumata Ngom
Fatoumata Ngom
Aug 29
9 min read

I still remember the first projects I worked on when I joined the OECD in 2018. They would transform my vision of the economy and the notion of progress - an understanding that my – quite exciting - position as a bridge between the international and Africa’s development communities has continued to enrich ever since. One of these projects involved conducting an in-depth analysis of the economic sectors that emit the most greenhouse gases, with the aim of formulating policy recommendations for climate change mitigation that could support economic growth in these sectors while ensuring the well-being of people and the envirionment. However, we must first agree on what well-being means: it goes far beyond simply feeling good. Well-being, as we understood it, encompasses both the circulation of wealth and life that flourishes - in the present as well as in the future - for everyone, not just on average.


According to our recommendations (2019 and 2020), fostering sustainable economic growth while ensuring well-being requires one fundamental shift: moving beyond Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the sole compass of economic policy, and recentring sectoral public policies around well-being objectives and budgets across industry, energy access, transport, urban planning and housing, and agriculture and food. This approach built on the OECD Well-being Framework and other initiatives such as New Zealand's Well-being Budget - themselves inspired by the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission mandated in 2008 to assess the limitations of GDP as a measure of economic performance and social progress, and to propose broader well-being indicators.


Furthermore, Professor J. Allister McGregor's visit to the OECD in 2018 - where he presented internally a reorganised framework drawing on Amartya Sen's capabilities approach ("doing", "having", "being") - was for me both inspiring and a catalyst, underscoring the urgency of locally adapting the universal dimensions of well-being in order to understand and address the political failures that lead to human indignity. Statistical indices defined as locally and as granularly as possible - at the level of countries, cities and communities - are crucial. They are not only mere measurement tools; they define the economic trajectory of peoples and communities.


More recently, reading a paper written by OECD's Chief Statistician and co-authors from other International Organisations - tracing the history of GDP and national statistics - had a revelatory effect on me - regarding the invitation of our times. An invitation addressed to Africa. As an African economist and statistician, my reading of this article was likely different from what the authors themselves intended to convey. This enlightening paper, which recounts the birth of the modern economy and its principal measurement instrument, the GDP - and in which one sees that Africa has not yet had a role, having been looted and bled for centuries - led me to reflect on the urgency of conceptual creation in Africa, and on the necessary decolonisation of African national statistical systems and indicator frameworks. It is important to recognise that frameworks created by the West and then superimposed onto Africa do nothing but reproduce unsustainable and ill-adapted colonial logics on a continent seeking to reclaim its sovereignty and creative capacity. This is all the more true in economic and statistical matters.


GDP as a tool of war


It is essential to know that GDP was born of a wartime vision - not of a vision of human progress and happiness. Understanding history is fundamental to grasping how the world moves, and to changing its trajectory. At the origin of GDP measurement lies first the notion of national income. The earliest attempts to measure national income date back to the seventeenth century in England and Wales, but it was the Great Depression of the 1930s, triggered by the 1929 stock market crash, that gave genuine impetus to the development of an economic instrument that would plunge the world into a form of growth that was simultaneously prosperous, deeply unequal, and profoundly problematic. Economists and governments of major Western nations sought to understand the scale of the Great Depression's damage and how to respond concretely - but they lacked reliable measurement tools. The economist Simon Kuznets was mandated by the United States Congress to produce estimates of the evolution of national income for the period 1929–1932. In 1933, Kuznets estimated a drastic fall of 50% in national income. He measured what households and businesses actually received as income, but wished to exclude from that calculation expenditures that did not directly serve "the satisfaction of consumers" - notably military spending and a large share of public expenditure.


From the outset, this first assessment of the Great Depression's economic impact provided the statistical justification for the New Deal - the set of economic and social reforms launched by Franklin Roosevelt from that same year to restore the country through increased state intervention in the economy: since the private sector was collapsing, public money had to be injected. Concretely, the American state massively invested in large public projects to revive the economy and create employment (dams, roads, infrastructure), regulated and reformed the banking and financial system by separating commercial and investment banking, supported farmers through production regulation, and established the first social safety nets such as retirement pensions and unemployment insurance.

Alongside Kuznets, in the United Kingdom, the British economist and statistician Colin Clark developed in 1937 a measure of national income from three simultaneous angles - production, income, and above all expenditure - thereby becoming another founding ancestor of GNP (Gross National Product).


The Second World War: The definitive architecture of GDP


It was the Second World War that fixed the GDP’s architecture as we know it today. In 1940, the British economist Keynes - the father of interventionist economic policy and inspired by the New Deal - included public expenditure in the measurement of national income in his book "How to Pay for the War," as Clark had done before him. This Keynesian logic prevailed over Kuznets's approach, because it allowed one to demonstrate that wartime expenditure did not reduce national income - on the contrary, it increased it. Kuznets would oppose throughout his life the inclusion of government and military expenditure in a measure of national income, arguing that such spending did not contribute to the quality of life and well-being of consumers.


Thus was born a powerful narrative around what would later become GDP - which, compared to GNP, refocuses on domestic production. The war economy found a ready-made justification, founded on validated statistics. President Roosevelt used it in his political communication to convince American citizens and world leaders of the utility of waging war and financing it massively. In 1942, the now-celebrated formula was formalised.* It must therefore be remembered that GDP was born of a will to wage war.


A Metric propagated and imposed on the rest of the World


Since the Great Depression and the Second World War, GDP has imposed itself as the universal standard of economic progress - serving a vision of development based on extraction and domination. After 1945, GNP and GDP spread globally for reasons as geopolitical as they were technical. The Marshall Plan conditioned aid on growth targets. The OEEC (OECD’s ancestor) made GDP its yardstick. The Cold War transformed it into an ideological weapon: statistics were to demonstrate the superiority of capitalism over communism.


GDP has entrenched a growth trap in which progress is indexed to permanent consumption and the unsustainable replacement of resources. As the Egyptian economist Samir Amin observed, focusing on gross domestic product entails forgetting that growth, with this metric, can be achieved through the destruction of productive forces - ultimately: the human being and natural resources." GDP legitimises choices that carry profound consequences for our societies. It includes military expenditure but excludes unpaid domestic labour - such as the work of women who choose to care for their families. GDP counts the extraction of natural resources as income, yet does not deduct the depletion of that same natural capital. A forest fire, an exhausted groundwater table or mine deposit, a community displaced by extractive operations in Darou Khoudoss, Mboro (Senegal), or elsewhere in the world - none of this is accounted for. GDP does not capture objective well-being (employment and employment quality, housing, health, education and skills, work-life balance, social connections, civic engagement and governance, environmental quality, security), and even less subjective well-being (sense of satisfaction, emotions). More surprisingly still, it takes no account of distributional inequalities, since growth can coexist with endemic poverty. GDP is very good at measuring the wealth produced by a country - but it says nothing about real life.


The state of our economies and our climate is the direct and structural consequence of this statistical and economic creature that is GDP. It is a logic of unlimited growth, blind to its own costs, which has legitimised decades of economic predation - particularly in countries of the Global South - without their societies seeing the benefits. Samir Amin had theorised, before most of the landmark reports propelled by the West and cited above, that the underdevelopment of developing countries is not a lag behind a more advanced model but the structural product of their integration into the global capitalist system - as he articulated in L'accumulation à l'échelle mondiale (1970) and Le développement inégal (1973).

This logic of war, originally instituted by the West, is in some ways reasserting itself: Official Development Assistance has been subject to drastic and unprecedented cuts over the past two years, generally in favour of increased national defence budgets among certain donors - whether they acknowledge it or not, and in accordance with their own priorities, which is entirely their prerogative. It is time for Africa to seize the silent yet precious invitation being extended to it: to reclaim power over its own development. Africa can break with the economy of war and death - this global economy shaped also by a certain kind of masculinity - and demonstrate a fertile economic governance that makes binding, whether through constitutional enshrinement (as Bhutan has done with its Gross National Happiness, anchored in sustainable and equitable socio-economic development, cultural preservation, environmental protection, and good governance) or through its finance laws, the implementation of public policies centred on what, in each country, makes life worth living.


Sustainable development is already a concept long embedded in many traditional African societies, which maintain a respectful relationship with nature and the living world - viewing them as guarantors of their own survival. Great African intellectuals such as Cheikh Anta Diop and Joseph Ki-Zerbo developed a solid and original body of thought on the necessity of producing a sustainable, ecological, and endogenous model of development for Africa. Samir Amin, with his own distinct vision, matched the rigour and technical sophistication of the great Western economists cited above. We must take up, consciously and in an updated form, the torch he laid down for those of us who are economists from the South - while fully recognising the interconnectedness of markets, economies, and governance: no disconnection is possible. It is now time to give conceptual form to all of this thinking, for each generation must discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it - and that process will allow Africa to say that it has risen from its history to contribute to a sound reconceptualisation of the world.


As Senegal revises its Constitution, it could be both effective and powerful to make the attainment of certain well-being objectives for the population politically and democratically binding - and to amend its Finance Law accordingly, in a pragmatic and realistic manner. I want Africa to be proud of itself and to be the agent of its own economy. It is Africa's responsibility to claim its place and demonstrate economic creativity at the governmental level: to eradicate poverty, establish good governance, and foster conscious individual freedom. This is the invitation of our time - grave, urgent, and yet beautiful.


References

Samir Amin,1973 : Le développement inégal


*See also the Meadows report (1970) The Limits to Growth, which already recommended defining indicators that go beyond GDP, and the equally decisive Brundtland Report (1987) Our Common Future.


** GDP is calculated by adding household consumption, business investment, and public expenditure, then adding exports (since they correspond to domestic production, even when sold abroad) and subtracting imports (since they are already counted but do not correspond to production carried out on national territory).

 
 
 

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