How has Africa performed over the long-run in terms of wellbeing? This column aims to answer this question by improving the UN’s Human Development Index. By looking at data stretching from 1870 to 2007, it argues that human development in Africa is lower than previously thought and that compared to the developed world, Africa stopped catching up in 1980 and began to fall behind.Concern about sluggish growth in Africa has led economists to investigate its performance and its determinants over the recent past (an exception is provided by Ndulu et al (2008), which covers the last half century). The dearth of data, however, has not discouraged economic historians from investigating earlier periods and providing explicit hypotheses about African long-run performance (Acemoglu and Robinson 2010, Austin 2008, Jerven 2010, Nunn 2008). Research, though, has focused on GDP per head and other dimensions of development have been largely neglected. Thus, questions such as “How has Africa performed over the long-run in terms of wellbeing?” and “How has Africa behaved vis-à-vis other developing regions?” have never been addressed.
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