Virtually all the European colonies were abandoned by 1963. White settler interests retarded the transition in Zimbabwe and Namibia, and in South Africa the indigenous population did not get political rights until 1994. Independence brought serious challenges. Very few countries, except Egypt, Morocco, and Ethiopia, had ever functioned as nation states. Most were multi-ethnic and political leadership had to create elements of national solidarity from scratch. There was a great scarcity of people with education or administrative experience. The new political elites frequently created one-party states or were involved in armed struggle. Cold war rivalry made donors less fastidious in allocating aid. As a result Africa accumulated large foreign debts which had a meagre developmental pay-off. It is the world’s poorest region. Education and health standards are low, 40 per cent of the population is below 15 years of age compared to 16 per cent in western Europe. In 2005, average life expectation was 51 years, annual population growth 2.2 per cent— nine times faster than in western Europe. Between 1980 and 2003 African per capita income stagnated, whilst it rose by half in the rest of the world. In spite of the large increase in foreign aid which has recently been pledged, the outlook for significant increases in African income remains bleaker than in other parts of the world.
...
In 1665, Petty presented the first estimates of income, expenditure, stock of land, other physical assets, and human capital in an integrated set of accounts for the whole economy of England and Wales. His accounts were brilliantly original. They provided a quantitative framework for effective implementation of fiscal policy and mobilization of resources in time of war. They foreshadowed techniques of growth accounting developed by Edward Denison 300 years later.
Graunt was the first serious demographer. He derived vital statistics, survival tables, and the population of London by processing and analysing christenings and burials recorded in the bills of mortality from 1603 to 1662. His work inspired Halley (1693) to publish the first rigorous mathematical analysis of life tables, which provided an actuarial basis for life insurance. After a lengthy hiatus, historical demography has gained new vigour in the last half-century and provides important clues on per capita income development, particularly for distant periods where evidence on output is poor.
Gregory King built on the work of Petty and Graunt. He constructed much more accurate and consistent estimates of income and expenditure for England and Wales. He was able to improve population estimates by exploiting information from hearth and poll taxes, a new tax on births, marriages, and burials, and his own mini-censuses for a few towns. He estimated world population by major region. He quantified and compared the economic performance of England, France, and Holland, and their capacity to finance the war of the League of Augsburg in which most of western Europe was engaged from 1689 to 1697. His income account delineated the social hierarchy in a dramatic way, showing the income of 26 types of household from lords to vagrants. His quantitative depiction of the social panorama in 1688 had no precursors. His most valuable contribution was to provide detailed evidence to estimate GDP broken down by 43 categories of expenditure for 1688. This provides an invaluable inter-temporal link to the estimates for the Roman world and to modern national accounts.
~~Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD -by- Angus Maddison
No comments:
Post a Comment