Category: Financialization

The Financialization of Africa鈥檚 Development

Richard Itaman4 Comments

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Financial development has gained prominence in Africa. Only with slight reservation around the regulatory environment, most country and regional studies of financial development paint a strikingly positive picture of its impact on growth, poverty and inequality. [i] This optimism with finance in Africa is corroborated with increase in financial flows, expansion of commercial bank branches, growth of regional banks, rise in microcredit institutions and success of mobile payment systems. [ii] However, poverty and inequality remain persistently high. There are more poor people in Africa today than in 1990, and 7 of the 10 most unequal countries in the world are in Africa. [iii] Hardly has any progress been made in addressing a most obstinate infrastructure gap unsettling the continent. In addition, Africa鈥檚 most recent average growth of 1.5 per cent is at its lowest in two decades. As such, the underscored belief in financial development as a driver of progress is exaggerated, since it seems to disregard the immediate needs of the people on the continent.

For these reasons, a growing body of literature now demonstrates wariness with the financial development narrative. An aspect of this literature reveals that the success story of microfinance in Africa is not quite what the proponents claim it to be. There is evidence of how the poor were plunged into a crisis of over-indebtedness in South Africa, through microfinance lending. By 2012, the country鈥檚 debt amounted to a staggering 75 per cent of disposable income. [iv] This experience contradicts the proposed poverty alleviating effects of microfinance. Like other forms of finance, its dominant motivation has been found to be profit seeking rather than poverty alleviation. Similar caution has been expressed about the celebrated rise of electronic payment systems,[v] prominent in Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda. Yet, more than just caution is needed to ensure that the proliferation of finance does not continue to wield detrimental effects on economic development in African countries.Read More »

Kicking Away the (Statistical) Ladder

assaj4012 Comments

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Developed countries often lecture developing and emerging countries on the appropriate policies and institutions necessary for economic success. This is done either bilaterally or through multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, IMF, OECD or European Union. Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang exposed the hypocrisy of this approach in his provocative 2002 book . Chang suggests that when today鈥檚 rich countries were themselves developing, they used practices opposite to what they preach today, including industrial policies, high tariffs and infant industry protection. Therefore their current advice to poorer countries amounts to 鈥榢icking away the ladder鈥� of development.

A lesser-known but equally disturbing process has occurred in the realm of economic statistics, in particular national income accounts. The EU and OECD often criticize the national accounts of developing countries, and a recent example is a claim made in a by Robert Barro: “There are suspicions that China鈥檚 reported growth rates in recent decades have been boosted by manipulation of the national-accounts data.” While no statistical system is beyond doubt, the biggest manipulations of data in history, in fact, have benefited (and were supported by) rich countries.Read More »