In this interesting and timely book, Franklin Obeng-Odoom focuses on the notion of inequality, both within Africa and between Africa and other regions of the world. The topic of inequality in developing economies, including sub-Saharan Africa, has already been explored by a large body of academic and policy literature. The originality of Obeng-Odoom’s book, as indicated by its title, is to analyse inequality via the concepts provided by the economics of institutions, notably those of property and wealth distribution. This focus on property is a crucial insight. Other scholars, such as Thomas Piketty in his book Capital and Ideology, have underscored the importance of property and human institutions in understanding inequality. The innovation of Obeng-Odoom’s study compared, for example, with that of Piketty is to demonstrate that institutional concepts are more pertinent than pure economic concepts, and, above all, to centre on developing economies and Africa in particular. In this regard, Obeng-Odoom’s book constitutes a key contribution to the investigation of stratification, which is of increasing importance in the field of economics. To support his arguments, Obeng-Odoom relies on abundant sources, including survey data, historical archives and many case studies from African countries. Equally, he displays an in-depth knowledge of relevant literature, as shown by the book’s impressive bibliography.
The book is organized into three parts. The first part presents ‘the problem’, which Obeng-Odoom frames as the global South being an element of a ‘compartmentalized world’. For Obeng-Odoom, the global South in fact refers to what Frantz Fanon called the ‘wretched of the earth’. The second part critically reviews existing explanations of Africa’s ‘backwardness’ and the various solutions that academics and policymakers have proposed to elevate the African continent from the bottom of the global stratification. The third and final part of the book examines alternatives, notably political ones, that have historically been suggested to the problem of African ‘underdevelopment’ and elaborates on the weaknesses that have affected such alternatives. These three parts are organized according to a clear and logical structure and substantiate the author’s arguments in a convincing way.
The first part consists of an introduction and a chapter entitled ‘The foundations of a new beginning’. These introductory pages lay down the core research question: what are the roots of global inequality and why does the global South, and Africa in particular, remain situated at the lowest levels of ‘development’? Obeng-Odoom critically reviews mainstream explanations for this state of affairs. He addresses arguments that hinge on the scarcity of various forms of capital (natural, physical, human); cultural traits; the lack of clearly formalized property rights; and ‘neopatrimonialism’, among many others – all of which characterize Africa, as well as the solutions that mainstream academics and policymakers have recommended. The main argument of the book is presented in this section and addresses the question of why development economics so often fails in Africa. Drawing on the work of stratification economists and black philosophers (such as Henry George and William Darity Jr) and aiming at a holistic approach, Obeng-Odoom situates the structural and institutional relationships between the privileged and underprivileged as the core explanation for global inequality. He also emphasizes the key importance of interconnections between institutions and identities (race, gender, class), as well as the shaping of politics by these various identities. For Obeng-Odoom, property plays a central role in these structural intersections, and the originality of his argument is to focus on concepts of space, land and rent. This allows the author to provide a powerful reinterpretation of existing data and facts on inequality and Africa’s ‘underdevelopment’ and explains the book’s title.
The second part of the book provides a detailed re-examination of mainstream analyses and policies that have so far addressed global inequality. The author critically re-evaluates studies of property economics, land reform, human capital, international trade and economic growth. These chapters show a remarkable knowledge of the studies and facts related to these respective fields, and are substantiated by a great amount of data and by figures and tables. The reappraisal of alternative frameworks aimed at solving the problem of global inequality, which constitutes the third part of the book, centres on ‘socialisms’ and ‘Africanisms’. In this section, he demonstrates that these frameworks remain relevant to understanding and, above all, to solving global inequality as long as they consider the nexus of concepts promoted by Obeng-Odoom – notably, those of property and expropriation.
Overall, these are innovative explorations and propositions that renew the study of inequality, especially with regard to developing economies and Africa in particular. In addition, this book is well written and presented with care. To sum up, this book is a must for all researchers and policymakers who are invested in refining concepts of inequality, development and stratification or who have an interest in the African continent and the political economy and institutions that have characterized its trajectory.
