Loomnie

Call for papers for a special issue of African Identities to be published in the summer of 2012 (African Identities: Journal of Economics, Culture and Society)

More than a decade and half ago, Donal Cruise-O’Brien (1996) had declared that the African youth were ‘a lost generation.’ This fatalistic summation of the fate of the African youth was perhaps for good reason. The enormous socio-economic and cultural forces surrounding the lives of young people in Africa were [and still are] simply daunting. And at the very core of this seemingly insurmountable socio-economic atmosphere are the pervasive unjust protocols of postcolonial regimes under which most African youth live. Indeed, more recent scholarship suggests that there is no respite yet for the African youth as the hopeless situation has escalated (See Abbink, Jon and Ineke Van Kessel 2005 & Alcinda Honwana and Filip De Boeck 2005). On account of the inclement socio-economic and political circumstances surrounding young people in Africa, what we are now witnessing across the entire continent is what Mamodou Douf (2003) describes as the ‘dramatic irruption of young people in both the domestic and public spheres,’ putting young people at the very heart of the continent’s socio-economic and political imagination (Durham 2006). But the challenges facing African youth are not peculiar to them.

All over the world, the new sociology of youth points to a growing concern about the ramifications of globalization, late modernity and general global social and economic restructuring for the lives and futures of young people. But amidst the lingering fears of the future of the young, scholars have also called for a deep reflection and rethinking of young people’s own resilience and agency in the midst of these turbulent times. This special issue of African Identities, tentatively entitled Late Modernity and Agency: Youth Cultures in Africa, seeks to reflect on the varied contours of youth responses to social change in Sub-Saharan Africa. While young people in Africa continue to face extraordinary social challenges in their everyday lives, what are the unique ways in which they have reinvented their circumstances to keep afloat in the midst of seismic global social changes? Papers are solicited on a wide range of topics on the African youth that may unravel young people not only as victims but also as active social actors in the face of a shifting global modernity. The themes may include amongst others,

- African Youth and Globalization
- Late Modernity and Social Change
- Youth and Media-Film, Television, Video, Internet, etc
- Hip-hop, Club Cultures and other forms of Popular culture
- Mobility and Social Media
- Gender and New Economies of Youth
- Democracy, Power and Youth Activism
- Youth and Conflict in Africa
- New Subjectivities and Agency
- Neo-Pentecostalism as Subculture
- The Informal Economy and Invented Pathways
- Lifestyles and Identity Constructions
- New Spatial Politics in Public and Domestic Spaces

Abstracts of not more than 500 words (including name, position, institutional affiliation, and email contact) may be sent to P.UGor@bham.ac.uk no later than September 30th, 2011. This special issue of African Identities will be published in the summer of 2012.

The Executive Summary:

African countries south of the Sahara are poised to enjoy a surge in growth in their banking systems during this decade. The three main drivers of this development will be generally very high rates of economic growth, financial deepening to fulfil huge unmet needs for basic financial services and new technologies to provide them—particularly over mobile phones.

In this report we trace out two scenarios for the growth of the sector. In the conservative scenario, driven exclusively by economic expansion, we project that the industry in 16 key African economies will boost its financial assets by 178% to US$980bn by 2020. In the more likely scenario, driven by both economic growth and financial deepening, we foresee assets expanding by 248% to US$1.37trn at the end of the decade (see chart).
The boom will vary markedly across the continent, however. Banking is likely to enjoy its most rapid expansion in Angola, increasing assets at least fivefold by 2020, as that country experiences a surge in petroleum production and builds up an industry long hampered by civil war and economic malaise. Banks in a number of other economies—including Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda—will expand assets at least threefold over the same period.
Slower-growing markets will include South Africa, which is the financial powerhouse of the continent but will expand its own banking sector only modestly by 2020. Botswana and Namibia, two other economies with well-developed banking systems, are also slated to expand banking assets at rates below the regional average.

In most regards the region is trailing the rest of the world in developing the banking systems that are vital for stronger economic development and growth. However, in some key aspects Sub-Saharan Africa is leading other regions in ways that will allow it to rapidly catch up, or even leapfrog forward, in the next decade and beyond. The continent’s industry is a leader in mobile banking and other innovative approaches to reaching new customers. Most of its markets are also unusually open among emerging markets to foreign banks and microfinance firms. More than anything else, it offers huge unmet financial needs in a world largely marked by excessive debt and leverage.

You can register here to download a summary of the full report.

Extracts:

Collier’s work is not informed by any explicit, overarching theory of development or any historical perspective that might inform one; nor does he offer any social analysis. There is an implicit theory of human behaviour, which is radically reductionist—individual economic self-interest rules. In this view, history appears to be a continuum of ‘14th-century reality: civil war, plague and ignorance’. But these countries had their own 14th centuries and now find themselves in the 21st, playing a highly subordinate role in global capitalism. No understanding of how they got there can ignore the impact of colonization. In Collier’s models, colonial history is reduced to two numbers, one representing the colonial power—Britain, France, Portugal, Belgium, Germany—the other, the length of time that the country was colonized. The identity of the colonizing power does have a bearing upon the ex-colonial country’s legal system, educational set-up,lingua franca and financial institutions; but it tells us nothing about the pre-colonial system, the different processes by which the European power made its peace with local rulers; nor about the ending of colonial rule, and the extent to which ruptures or continuities determined the nature of the ex-colonial state. Such considerations help to inform a richer explanation of how a country has developed, and provide a deeper explanatory framework for civil wars, social conflicts or institutional forms—social and political questions, not purely statistical ones.

It is misleading to paint a picture of endemically low growth rates in sub-Saharan Africa, or in the other ‘bottom billion’ countries. In Africa, growth rates in the 1960s and early 1970s were comparable to those of Southeast Asia or Latin America. This was a period of African industrialization, based on import substitution; with improvements in economic management, this might have enabled several countries to take advantage of export markets. The droughts in the early 70s were a real blow, turning food self-sufficiency into food imports; most African economies were severely affected by the oil-price hikes, and still more so by interest-rate rises after 1979. But a possible industrial rehabilitation was stalled in the early 80s by World Bank and IMF opposition to ISI, and promotion instead of primary commodities and ‘getting prices right’. Collier fails to point out that African countries were forced to pursue primary-commodity exports as a consequence of World Bank conditionalities; as noted, these are not included in his list of explanatory variables. Collier takes the familiar line on trade, criticizing rich-country barriers to the exports of the ‘bottom billion’ but also, and far more fervently, tariffs set by developing countries. In his account, Africa simply ‘missed the boat’ in the 1980s and ceded global markets to Asia; only Mauritius—hardly a typical African country, if an African country at all—managed to ‘climb on board’. It was not simply low wages that attracted investment to the Asian Tigers, however, but their well-educated populations and skilled labour from the 60s on. Here again, a historically informed account of colonial and post-colonial social structures must be a factor in any satisfactory explanation.

Read the whole piece here (H/T Schauzeri).  Any analysis that fails to pay history its proper due should be suspect.

On the subject of numbers and statistical analysis. This says it quite succinctly:

Statistics are a great way of quickly conveying how a group of events, people, or things are similar and different. Mode, median and mean measure “central tendency,” and standard deviation and inter-quartile range tell you “dispersion.” With these two types of measures, you can tell me how similar people are when they choose orange juice, how different they are when they rent cars or attend movies. But you cannot tell me what “more pulp,” means to people, why a “subcompact” car turns off some people, or what people perceive the word “blockbuster” to actually mean.

In short, ethnographic research can clarify all of these deep, nuanced details that quantitative data skates over or takes for granted. Do you want to know how many people attended a “summer blockbuster?” Then by all means, count them. But if you want to know what kind of movie people believe a “blockbuster” to be, then you need to do in-depth ethnographic work.

Abstract

The report provides a comparative study of the impact of Asian companies on the two leading oil producing countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria and Angola.

The report shows that Asian companies that gained a foothold in the Nigerian oil sector in return for their commitments to invest in downstream and infrastructure projects failed to understand the political context of the time.

The report considers why, in contrast, the Chinese oil strategy has been so successful in Angola to the detriment of other Asian national oil companies and international oil companies; how Angola emerged as the second largest supplier of oil to China in 2008; how Chinese oil companies have negotiated deals; and what the benefits are for Angola.

China’s experience is compared with those of India, South Korea and Japan.

The full paper is here.

I haven’t had time to read the full report yet, but here is FT’s Tom Burgis’s commentary on it – a sort of very brief summary.

Maybe a fallout of the current global crisis is a kindler, gentler IMF. The Fund just published a staff position note titled Fiscal Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa in Response to the Impact of the Global Crisis

The executive summary:

The global financial crisis poses significant challenges to fiscal policies in Sub-Saharan African countries. Growth will weaken considerably as export prices and volumes, remittances, tourism, and capital flows decline. The fiscal effects of the crisis are likely to be large and to operate mainly via revenue losses, with commodity-related revenues particularly hard hit.

Countries will need to weigh their options for fiscal policy responses. Countries with output gaps and sustainable debt and financing options have scope to implement expansionary policies, by letting automatic stabilizers work, accommodating declines in commodity-related revenues, and in some cases implementing discretionary fiscal stimulus. The main focus of fiscal stimulus should be on the expenditure side, particularly infrastructure and social spending given pressing needs, as reducing tax rates may be inequitable and the scope for doing so is limited given low revenue ratios. Other countries will have to adjust, in a way that will not affect critical spending. Additional donor support would reduce the need for adjustment. In all cases, countries should give priority to expanding social safety nets as needed to cushion the impact of the crisis on the poor.

Hat-Tip to Dani Rodrik. His comments on the policy note are here.