How is Africa actually doing?

Free Exchange: How is Africa actually doing?

HERE'S a toy version of what most people would recognise as the received wisdom on sub-Saharan Africa's economic performance in recent years:

Some countries have had a pretty sustained period of high growth rates. But growth has been fairly concentrated in some resource-rich countries; most of the benefits of that growth have gone to the rich. In any case, a rising population means that per capita income growth has been unspectacular. All this together means that the recent period of relatively good growth has not made much of a dent on poverty rates.

Two recent papers attempting to revisit the "How has Africa actually fared" question use different methods to answer the question. Interestingly, while these methods are, in some ways, at odds with one another, they both reach the conclusion that the conventional wisdom on Africa's economic performance understates its economic success. …