(How) is Africa learning from its mistakes?

There is a useful symposium on Africa at the Boston Review revolving around Ted Miguel's essay, including contributions by Bob Bates, Paul Collier, and David Weil. The questions are: what is driving Africa's recent growth, and how sustainable is it?  Is growth the result of good policies, democratic governance, Chinese investment, or high commodity prices?  And is it a blip, or something more permanent?

Collier offers the simplest answer of all: African policy makers have been learning from their mistakes.

But the growth we are seeing today is not just a result of commodity booms. I don’t think that is the key to Kenya’s pre-election economic success. There is a process at work that does not depend on democracy and is so simple that analysts generally miss it: learning from mistakes. Since 1970 African societies have accumulated a huge stock of experience in how not to manage an economy. For example, from the mid-1970s until the mid-1980s Tanzania adopted regulatory policies that proved to be ruinous. The knowledge they gained through failure is valuable. Tanzania is now one of the best-managed of all Africa’s economies. The European society with the best record of containing inflation over the past sixty years is Germany. It has the best record because it used to have the worst: the experience of hyperinflation immunized Germans from macroeconomic folly.

Miguel endorses this view, but spins it differently, focusing on the advantaged of randomized impact evaluations.    

While it’s natural to focus on such success stories, randomized evaluations don’t always produce positive results about program impacts. But information on failures is just as useful; it allows policymakers to shift funding from the projects that don’t work toward those that do. This is at the heart of the learning agenda that ... is the key to Africa’s economic future. Democracies like those emerging in Africa are particularly good learning environments, settings where impact evaluations can be carried out, their fruits widely distributed, and governments held accountable for applying their lessons to policy. In nations with weaker governance, rigorous program evaluations can themselves serve as a form of political accountability, empowering decent government officials to push for reform.

With impact-evaluation results in hand, policymakers in poor countries will increasingly be able to rely on hard evidence when deciding how to use their scarce resources. We now know the benefits of anti-parasitic drugs in improving school attendance in Busia, and as a result the Kenyan national government has included mass school-based deworming in its official school health plan for the country. Word has spread, and other African countries have expanded their own school deworming plans. In Ghana, over four million children received anti-parasitic drugs at school in 2007.

Learning about deworming is a small step forward on its own. But it will be through many such small lessons—in areas as diverse as health, education, agriculture, governance, and foreign aid—that African countries might learn to sustain and possibly augment their recent economic growth, even after the inevitable fall in global commodity prices.

I think Collier would say that the learning that comes from having followed disastrous macro, trade, and financial policies is much more important than any learning from randomized evaluations--even though the former hardly qualifies as "hard evidence" in the sense that Miguel uses the term. 

I would add that randomized impact evaluations rarely generate usable "hard evidence" for policy makers. As soon as we generalize, scale up, or extrapolate we are in the business of transforming hard evidence into soft evidence.  I wish Miguel were right when he writes: "With impact-evaluation results in hand, policymakers in poor countries will increasingly be able to rely on hard evidence when deciding how to use their scarce resources." Alas, we are doomed to live in a world of soft evidence.  And pretending otherwise may itself end up skewing where resources go.

Comments

[Manu]

mmm... it sounds like a convincing argument, except for the fact that learning vanishes...
I don't think that developing economies learn from what they suffered 20 years ago. I mean after a traumatic experience they learn, they put in practice their new knowledge, but after 10 years they forgot what they suffered and fall back into bad policies. In short, bad policies of the 70s are reverted in the 80s/90s the latest, but are reinstated in the 00s. This is the only explanation I can find for what's going on in some Latin American countries.

[ben]

I agree with you in substance, but just a couple of rhetorical points:

I don't think you should characterize everything as "soft evidence," because that implies that evidence itself doesn't have a lot of value. It does, and there's a big difference between making decisions based on rigorous impact evaluations and making decisions based on guesswork. The trend towards the former is a very positive one. Rather, I think a better way to put it is that there are lots of different ways of generating hard evidence, of which randomization is only one.

I also think you might be emphasizing the idea of experimentation a little too much, in a way that could be misleading particularly to non-economists. One way to think about it is, in the real world the choice set of all policies is basically anything a person of below-average intelligence could be talked into thinking is a good idea. You aren't talking about experimenting among all of these policies- you're talking about experimenting across a very narrow subset (one that is informed by mainstream economic theory and empirical evidence). Going too far with the experimentation metaphor does a disservice to what you're really talking about, as I think some of the Mao comments allude to. I might describe your approach more along the lines of accepting that each case has its own set of unknowns, rather than in terms of experimentation. Not to mention, "its own set of unknowns" kind of rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

[Dani Rodrik]

Ben --

Very useful clarification, thank you. I always forget how much I take for granted, and it is very useful to be reminded of it...

[Bheku]

hmm, it explains a lot, learn by experience, so every counttry will be ruined, could not learn from others must make the mistakes yourself, Zimbabwe did not learn from others, made same mistakes, South Africa has not learnt same mistakes. I guess best teacher is to be burnt, but seeing somebody elses burns should be a lesson not to play with fire.

[Michael Seifu]

I think Collier's assessment seems a bit simplistic and optimistic. Africa's economic performance was abysmal in the 1970s and 1980s. Whatever improvements we observe now signify a catch-up process as opposed to a pay-off from a long term learning process. Secondly, in as much as learning from the past helps for policy making it is also the case that success hinges on overcoming the new and quickly changing realities of today and tomorrow. I have a few reservations in that regard. What happened the NEPAD Peer review mechanism? Despite its huge promises, it just fell prey to political manipulations of leaders in the region. Consider how governments after governments in the region use the Chinese link to tradeoff global pressures on good governance. Who is to say that Africa is not playing its usual peripheral role as a supplier of primary commodities to fuel Chinese growth? These and many events in the region put the assertion that Africa governments enhanced their policy making for good in doubt. As a final reminder, take a note of the facts that African growth is being speargheaded high commodity prices. It is only when the rainy days arrive that we can for sure say Africa economic growth has indeed been robust.

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