Development/professionalisation of economics in West Africa
Development economics emerged in the 1940s as a specialised branch of economic science studying growth, inequality, poverty and institutions in the economies of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Downplaying the neoclassical obsession with allocative efficiency, and appealing instead to the lessons of the great classical political economists on capital accumulation, technical progress and distribution in the long-run, by the time of West African independence the new sub-discipline had reached a consensus on several key points, such as the importance of capital formation as a growth engine, the need to adopt import substitution strategies and the general need for the state to plan development in order to promote industrialization. The fulfilment of these ambitious goals was thought to depend on the availability of technocratic experts who could analyse real economies and modify them according to human design: economics had come to increasingly resemble a form of social engineering. Regardless of their position on the socialismcapitalism continuum, the new African nations needed indigenous elites of academics and civil servants trained in economics and statistics. From the 1940s on, many influential economic ideas in West Africa came from professional economists.The professionalisation of economics can be understood in an institutional constellation comprising universities, professional associations, academic journals and policy-making bodies. The University College of the Gold Coast (later University of Ghana) established the first Department of Economics in West Africa in 1948, followed by the University College of Ibadan in 1957. Francophone colonies took longer to establish universities, as the tendency lingered for African students to complete their education in France. The creation of economics departments in West African universities led to the constitution of professional associations and the foundation of academic journals like The Economic Bulletin of Ghana (EBG) and The Nigerian Journal of Economic and Social Studies (NJESS).
Admittedly, foreign economists continued to be important in West African policy-making. Perhaps most notably, W. Arthur Lewis served as Ghana's Chief Economic Advisor in 1957—8, and Nicholas Kaldor was the architect of Ghanaian fiscal reform in 1961. The striking adherence of economic policies implemented under Nkrumah between 1960 and 1966 to the prescriptions of the first generation of development economists led Tony Killick (2010) to define Ghana a case of ‘development economics in action'. The preparation of the first development plan in independent Nigeria fell on the shoulders of Austrian Wolfgang Stolper. Meanwhile Mali and Guinea relied on the expertise of imported Marxists: the Egyptian Samir Amin and the Frenchman Jean Bernard in the case of Mali, and the Frenchman Charles Bettelheim in the case of Guinea. But West African economists were increasingly involved in the tasks of policymaking and nation-building, and started staffing what in the West African context were fairly recent institutions like central banks, planning commissions and statistical offices. For example, Sierra Leonean economist David Carney (b. 1925) authored in 1962 the first postcolonial development plan for his country. Jonathan Frimpong-Ansah (1930—99) started working in the Ghanaian Office of the Government Statistician and then served as Deputy Governor or Governor of the Bank of Ghana under four regimes until 1973.
In postcolonial Nigeria the advice of indigenous economists was increasingly sought by the government for issues as different as tax reform, wage and income policy, financial regulation, and land policy (Tomori, 1979, 44-9). The career of Nigerian Pius Okigbo (1924-2000) embodies the nexus of technical expertise and political skills which came to characterise many influential West African economists: the first African to receive a PhD from North-Western University, Okigbo became also the first Nigerian ambassador to the European Economic Community and, during the Nigerian civil war (1967-70), the first economic advisor to the short-lived Republic of Biafra, as well as chairman of the Federal Planning Committee of Nigeria, chairman of the UN Panel of Experts of the African Development Bank, and member of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (on the life and work of Okigbo, see Guyer and Denzer, 2005).
Yet development policy was now also a supranational enterprise with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations. The UN Economic Commission for Africa, created in 1958, became an important institutional platform used by West African economists to discuss and implement policies of economic integration. A striking example is Nigerian Adebayo Adedeji (b. 1930) who, after serving the Nigerian government for several years, became in 1975 the Executive Commissioner of the Commission. Another important example is the UN African Institute for Economic Development and Planning, located in Dakar (Senegal), whose directors have included Senegalese Mamadou Toure (1964-7) and Gambian Jeggan Senghor (1990-9).While West Africa provided the setting for much influential research in development (classic works include Bauer (1954) on trade and marketing boards, Hill (1963) on cocoa farmers and indigenous capitalism in Ghana, and Hart's (1973) notion of the ‘informal economy') West African economists in the 1960s attached primary importance to empirical work rather than the construction of theoretical models. In his 1962 presidential address to the Nigerian Economic Society, J. Amadi-Edina (1962, 3) urged Nigerian economists to ‘Spend little time in theorizing... [and] engage more in fact finding... spend less time in abstractions, more in observation, less time in analysis and model making'. Indeed, many articles published in EBG and NJESS in the 1960s tackled problems of specific economic and social statistics, provided new estimates, and presented suggestions on how to improve the effectiveness of planning machinery (see for example Aboyade, 1965 on Nigeria and Omaboe, 1963 on Ghana). The collection of economic data was not simply an intellectual exercise: better data were considered vital to successful development planning. Despite their diversity, development plans shared a pivotal political significance in the eyes of African policymakers as representations of national sovereignty and rationality.
Despite its apparent lack of theoretical ambition, the collection of useful and reliable information about African economies required in many cases a partial re-conceptualization of the categories adopted in industrialized countries. Thus one of the main contributions of West African economists in the 1960s was to provide a more solid basis for policy by their work at the intersection of local realities and imported templates. An important part of this task was assessing the limits of existing information, and introducing more useful distinctions and more realistic assumptions in the conceptual frameworks inherited from colonial regimes or the new international organizations. Okigbo, for example, under the auspices of the Federal Ministry of Economic Development, published in 1962 a lengthy study of Nigerian national accounts which, drawing on a large number of government sources and introducing useful conceptual distinctions, marked an improvement over Prest and Stewart's (1953) ‘colonial' study of Nigerian national income in 1950-1 (Okigbo, 1962).
This empirical focus does not imply that economists were not questioning once again the utility of ‘Western' doctrines for economic analysis and policy in West Africa. In his presidential address to the Economic Society of Ghana, J.H. Mensah, a LSE-trained Ghanaian economist and the main author of the seven-year plan intended to transform Ghana into a socialist economy under Nkrumah (and which was abruptly abandoned following the 1966 coup), discussed the relevance of Marxian economics for Ghana's development. Mensah noted that Marxism emerged as a system of thought to explain economic evolution in the West, and argued that the notion of class struggle was useless in the African context because a ‘country like Ghana cannot afford the luxury of not utilising some of its available trained manpower' (Mensah, 1965, 15). Thus socialist thought ‘ought to move from the concept of class conflict and increasingly emphasise the concept of nation building through the joint efforts of all citizens' (ibid.).
Certainly the relationships between rulers and African top planners were often far from simple. Mensah, who was accused by Nkrumah of lacking ideological purity and invited to put his commitment to socialism into writing (Tignor, 2006, 185), was also imprisoned from 1975 until 1978 by the military government of I.K. Acheampong, while Okigbo was jailed for eighteen months for his role in the secessionist project of the Republic of Biafra. Yet, the work of the first generation of West African economists could not be easily disentangled from the tasks of nation-building and modernization which, regardless of ideological differences, loomed large and accounted for most economic research.On the other hand, professionalisation and research in post-colonial West African economics were accompanied by the development of ‘local' intellectual traditions. In the case of Nigeria, for example, the so-called ‘Ibadan School' from the 1960s through the 1980s developed a distinctive approach to public finance. Given the vast size of Nigeria and the fierce struggles over the federal structure and the distribution of public revenues, it is not surprising that economic research was shaped significantly by problems of taxation and redistribution among different levels of government. While holding different beliefs on many important issues, the Ibadan school was united by the extensive use of calculation and statistical evidence to construct new tools and operational concepts to understand and improve the complex reality of Nigerian fiscal machinery (Adebayo, 1990, 245-6).
The articles published in the NJESS in the 1970s and early 1980s reveal that the Ibadan school were part of a broader tendency in West African economics to increasingly employ quantitative methods. While West African economists in the 1960s were discussing the quality of official statistics, in the following decades ‘numbers' were increasingly accepted and used in a number of articles using tools derived from econometric analysis and linear programming. In the NJESS the proportion of articles using statistical methods increased from 25 per cent in 1962-70 to 42 per cent in 1971-6. Similarly, papers using mathematical methods increased from 17 per cent in the 1960s to 35 per cent in 1971-6 (calculations based on Adamu, 1979, 86). It is possible that West Africans' progressive embrace of quantitative analysis was related to the worsening conditions experienced by many local universities. Indeed from the 1970s, and even more so in the 1980s, ‘migration' became the context of much African academic writing in the social sciences (Falola, 2001, 287). In particular, an increasing number of scholars migrated to the United States. Apparently the first multi-probit model published in NJESS was from a PhD thesis submitted by the author at Cornell University (Falusi, 1974, 3).