Economists are among the most feared and misunderstood contributors to development studies. Many of the biggest development gaffes have been justified by a very narrow interpretation of basic economic principles—often to the horror of the academic community. As such, a reference book geared toward policymakers and development practitioners that can help to dispel myths about the opportunities for and limitations of the study of economics in Africa could have a tremendous impact on efforts to improve human welfare. Similarly, a reference book geared toward students and academics that surveys the contributions that economics research in Africa has made to the discipline could go a long way in enriching academic work and increasing the representation of Africa in economics journals.

The stated goals of the Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics are to do both of these things. In particular, the editors, according to the introduction, intended the Handbook to function as an “authoritative” collection examining the use of various economic theories and approaches within an African context and the ways in which the study of African economies has influenced the study of economics. The intended audience is equally wide ranging. The editors aimed to “bridge the gap” between the academy and policymakers and to offer a guide for a diverse readership of researchers, students, and development practitioners, including noneconomists. Certainly such an agenda would give rise to a large and diverse set of articles, and the editors chose a wide array of papers from many well-known and top-notch economists (and other social scientists) working on issues related to Africa.

I appreciate that the Handbook includes contributions from academics and practitioners with a wide range of training and experience and from institutions in developed as well as less-developed countries. But while this two-volume handbook looks like a reference, presents itself as a reference, and yields lower back pain when carried like a reference, it is not a reference book. Moreover, some of the editorial decisions and portrayals of current economic thinking lead to an inaccurate view of modern economists, economic theory, and current debates in the economics of development, which could be misleading to noneconomists or to those who are already skeptical of the field.

First, the Handbook is not set up in a way that makes it easy to navigate as a reference book. Both volume 1 (“Context and Concepts”) and volume 2 (“Policies and Practices”) include histories of development and narratives about specific sectors or social institutions; both volumes even include articles about the economics of marriage in North Africa. It is therefore not an easy task to find, say, all of the articles about economics of the family or all of the discussions about the history of development thought and its practices in Africa. The discussion of human capital accumulation appears, oddly, in the social economics section, and a discussion of how to conduct household research in a setting with very complex family structures is not located, as one would expect, in the methodology section. In short, if you want to learn about a specific economic topic and its applications in Africa, this is not the best source.

Second, this is not really a handbook about Africa and economics. Many of the microeconomics topics in the volume are specific to a particular time period or subtopic and do not provide a survey of the economics research or even the current state of knowledge in the field. For example, Jean-Claude Berthelemy and Josselin Thuilliez (vol. 2, ch. 27) discuss microeconomic development research related to health—including the effects of product adoption, user fees, and health information. However, this article is specific to malaria and therefore does not survey the larger literature on information economics, social marketing, or market failures in health care provision.

In addition, with the exception of a few articles the book largely ignores the extensive work in applied microeconomics in Africa, particularly (though not exclusively) the Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) movement (e.g., Banerjee and Duflo Reference Banerjee and Duflo2011). Like it or not, development economics is becoming increasingly more of an applied microeconomics field, and RCT (and quasi-experimental methods), which describes market failures and studies how households and firms make economic decisions in settings characterized by market failures and often weak institutions, has been a large part of this trend. It is within this literature that we can learn about the impacts of policies on people and households (as acknowledged by Beegle et al. in vol. 1, ch. 2), and it is also within this literature that we can learn about the effects of policies and programs on production, given the large proportion of African workers employed in household-run enterprises.

The editors justify omitting a direct analysis of the RCT movement by considering it as a subset of the Washington Consensus wave of development—but this is a grouping that is inappropriate both chronologically and ideologically. While both schools might be considered “neo-classical,” the Washington Consensus was a nonacademic set of policy recommendations. The RCT literature, in contrast, is the work of academics (sometimes in collaboration with international organizations and governments). It studies the outcomes of policies and microdevelopment programs, and aims to reduce poverty by understanding individual and firm behavior—not by making macro–policy recommendations. In addition, the Washington Consensus policies were largely implemented in the 1980s–1990s, while this microeconomic development movement is ongoing. Therefore, grouping RCT with the Washington Consensus is a misrepresentation of the discipline.

If The Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics is not a handbook, then, and does not represent the field of economics, what is it and who should read it?

It was not until I was reading the introduction to volume 2 that I realized that the editors had no intention of presenting a handbook of “Africa and Economics.” This is, rather, a feasibility study on Africa and structural change—that is, the development model introduced by Arthur Lewis in 1954 which asserts that a necessary and sufficient condition for economic growth is movement of the labor force from a low-productivity “traditional” sector to higher productivity “modern” sectors. The Lewis Model did accurately describe development patterns in countries with surplus labor in the traditional sector and a modern sector that expanded through increased savings and investment (rather than high-interest borrowing). But Lewis himself argued against the relevance of his model to Africa, where there was no excess labor in the traditional sector due to a relatively low population density. Thus when the Lewis Model was applied to postcolonial development strategies in many African countries (by means of expensive borrowing and in the absence of excess labor), the results were catastrophic. Even today many African countries are experiencing growth-reducing structural change (see McMillian & Rodrik 2011).

This is not to suggest that the appropriateness of structural change policies for Africa does not deserve exploration; indeed, the editors should be commended for seeking a range of opinions, particularly in volume 2, on many issues relating to this. I wish, however, that starting with the title they had been clearer about their goal of providing a context for thinking about structural change. Indeed, particularly in a work of this size it falls on the editors not only to solicit a wide array of contributions, but also to create a narrative linking the individual parts to one another and to the economics discipline as a whole—to explain, in other words, how the volume is more than the sum of its parts. Rather, they leave it to the reader to identify the questions that the Handbook addresses and to figure out why they chose to put particular papers in a given section.

For example, two back-to-back chapters—Paul Collier’s “Africa’s New Economic Opportunities” (vol. 1, ch. 24) and Ha-Joom Chang and Christopher Cramer’s “Tigers or Tiger Prawns” (vol. 1, ch. 25)—both review Africa’s current economic position and potential for growth. Each one presents an economic growth forecast for several countries in Africa or at least the average or modal forecast, and Chang and Cramer, in particular, is a delight to read (whether or not one agrees with the authors’ conclusions). But if the two chapters are considered as a pair the rewards are even greater, and one registers some very important points: that economists do not have a uniform characterization of Africa’s past economic performance, do not agree on the current health of many African economies, and have very different economic forecasts. But without more guidance from the editors the debate is lost in a thematic section that also includes discussions of the African slave trade and climate change, a contextualization of the labor market, and a description of urbanization in Africa. These articles appear in part 3 of volume 1, which has the amorphous title “Historical Trajectories and Economic Landscape.” This category is so broad that a reader, in the absence of an informative introduction, has no idea of the questions or debates that she might encounter here.

With these problems in mind, I would like to offer some guidance to two potential audiences who could benefit from this Handbook: Africanists who are not economists, and economists who are not Africanists.

I would suggest, for example, that Africanist noneconomists start with the appendix to chapter 16 in part 1 (“Concepts”) of volume 1—Celestin Monga’s “Principles of Economics: African Counter Narratives.” This section presents Gregory Mankiw’s widely agreed-upon “10 Principles of Economics” along with ten alternative principles, which Monga calls the “African counter narrative.” This claim is perhaps too strong, since most of these newly proposed principles, though different from Mankiw’s, are not inconsistent with them, and they are also applicable to economic behavior outside Africa. Nevertheless, they provide a useful grounding in economic theory for nonspecialists. For example, Mankiw’s first principle is that “people face trade offs.” If a child spends an hour at school, she is also spending an hour not contributing to household production. Monga’s principle is that “Poor people face difficult . . . trade-offs that lead to intergenerational traps.” A household facing a financial crisis might choose to take children out of school to sustain a certain level of current consumption, but in doing so, the family forgoes the possibility of the higher future income that might accrue to a well-educated child. This example describes a type of poverty trap and the way in which decisions (or a lack of options) can affect the welfare of future generations. Another counter-principle does not directly correlate to any of Mankiw’s principles but is consistent with general economic theory: the claim that “social interactions determine economic decisions and outcomes.” This assumption is based on the observation that economic behavior takes place within a complex set of formal and cultural institutions and that when people face trade-offs, they are sometimes choosing between economic and social well-being.

Monga’s article would have been a more powerful teaching tool if the counter-principles had been set up to correspond directly with Mankiw’s principles. But for the most part the article can help noneconomists understand that basic principles of economics are not as rigid as an introductory economics book can make them seem. With these concepts in hand, readers can then get much more out of the entire “Concepts” section of the book (though from chapter 5 on the articles become more technical). I specifically recommend Golub and Hayat’s “Employment, Unemployment, and Underemployment in Africa” (vol. 1, ch. 8), which offers a very readable explanation of the general concept of structural change as well as a discussion of Africa’s relatively high labor costs relative to GDP, a factor that helps explain barriers to increasing the urban labor force.

I would also recommend Yaw Nyarko’s chapter (vol. 2, ch. 25), a comprehensive discussion of the effects of human migration on economic development that can familiarize readers with the ideas of incentives and trade-offs. Jenny Aker and Joshua Blumenstock’s chapter (vol. 2, ch. 18) explains the concept of a market failure and shows how the introduction of a new technology can reduce market failures and ultimately improve welfare. An excellent chapter by Germano Mwabu (vol. 2, ch. 26) shows the interrelations among health, income, education, and development in the latter third of last century. It gives a very clear description of the dual causality of health improvements and income growth and would be a very useful source for people who are unfamiliar with the challenges of establishing causal relationships using economics data. Economists interested in the impact of institutions on economic outcomes might enjoy Takaaki Masaki and Nicolas Van de Walle’s “The Impact of Democracy on Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1982–2012” (vol. 1, ch. 36) because of the discussion of identification issues (although whether or not these issues are resolved is up to the reader). Juliet Elu and Gregory Price’s “The Causes and Consequences of Terrorism in Africa” (vol. 1, ch. 40) argues that terrorism, far from being an outcome of poverty, is actually the reverse (i.e., incidents increase with income).

Some of the chapters in the book synthesize key concepts about economic activity in Africa and may be more useful to students than to scholars. For this audience I recommend the chapters by Kathleen Beegle et al. (vol. 1, ch. 2), Catherine Guirkinger and Jean-Philippe Platteau (vol. 1, ch. 3), and Felwine Sarr (vol. 1, ch. 17). Beegle et al. describe the difficulty of measuring household income in Africa due to the nature of employment and the dynamics of households. Guirkinger and Platteau discuss the role of family and clan in land rights and production. Sarr explains the significant extra-household social structures that underlie economic decision-making and the importance of these structures in overcoming market failures. It should be noted, however, that certain comments in the article suggesting that the “power” of economics over human behavior is, or should be, “limited” were perplexing, since no economist claims that economics determines behavior, only that it can explain behavior. I am also not clear why this article was placed in part 2 of volume 1 (“Methodological Issues”) rather than in part 1 (“Concepts”).

Another caveat is that some of the articles present a rather dated view of economics, which may have been a result of its foundation in Arthur Lewis’s seventy-year-old theory. For example the Handbook leads with a critique of economics by Fabien Eboussi Boulaga (vol. 1, ch. 1) that uses sources that are nearly all over twenty years old. The discipline has come a long way since the 1980s, and this article should have been included more for its historical perspective than as an introduction. Hippolyte Fofack (vol. 1, ch. 15) critiques a very old concept of development as economic growth that is now outdated. Modern economists are quite aware that growth does not necessarily correlate with development (though usually it does) and that other factors that are now measured, such as equality, well-being, health, and education, also need to be considered.

While most of the articles in the Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics are therefore solid, engaging, and thought-provoking, the book’s idiosyncratic and unclear organization makes it difficult to navigate. While the editors acknowledge that the handbook could have been organized in a number of different ways, they give little justification of their own strategy. They fail to provide a roadmap to direct specific target audiences to articles most appropriate to their needs, and there is no contextualization of the chapters in terms of specific arguments or debates that they address. At a minimum readers may risk missing some of the more nuanced contributions to this Handbook. A bigger fear, however, is that a “cover to cover” reading could mislead readers about current economic thinking and debates.