2 October 2013

Is Sub-Saharan Africa like Medieval Europe?

A new report suggests that African economies resemble those of Medieval Europe, and so hopes of sustained growth across the continent are unrealistic.

Economists have long puzzled over why economies across much of Sub-Saharan Africa still lag behind. Two LSE researchers, Stephen Broadberry and Leigh Gardner, have come up with a new explanation.

Many economies across Sub-Saharan Africa resemble those of medieval Europe, they argue, not just because GDP per capita is comparable (adjusting to 1990 prices), but also because they lack the political institutions to sustain economic growth. And just like Medieval Europe, African economies experience sporadic spurts of growth, followed by economic reversals.

The only way the Medieval economies of Northern Europe were able to start sustaining growth was when the state became strong enough to secure property rights, and yet democratic enough that politicians couldn’t arbitrarily intervene in business. This simply hasn’t happened in much of Africa, the report maintains. As a result, despite impressive growth figures in parts of the continent – an IMF report in April predicted that Sub-Saharan Africa is set to grow three times faster than America, Japan and Western Europe in 2014 – there isn’t much cause for optimism. Africa will take a long, long time to catch up.

They even compare Sub-Saharan African economies with different periods of Medieval Europe – so for instance, the average earner in Sierra Leone, Burundi and Malawi has the same annual income as the average Englishman before the Black Death in the fourteenth century ($750), while average per capita income in South Africa and Botswana ($2,000) is comparable to an average Englishman around 1800.

So how helpful are these findings? An FT Alphaville blog says that the theory is flawed in parts because you can’t really map modern African political institutions onto medieval ones (is Kenya’s political system really Tudor?) and because countries' fortunes change in unpredictable ways. The Economist suggests that as well as focusing on the importance of political institutions it should consider social changes too – improved public health care and education will boost African growth.

Sometimes a thought-provoking historic parallel can be a good way to focus public attention on an issue. Oxfam, for instance, recently issued a report warning that the UK risked returning to ‘Victorian levels’ of inequality. The LSE report is a way to highlight the importance of addressing the problems of corruption, unaccountability and political patronage that thwart many economies in Sub-Saharan Africa. But comparing the vast and varied region to Medieval Europe is overly reductive.

It is also unfair. Medieval in often used inter-changeably with “backwards” and while the authors don’t imply this directly, they do suggest that Sub-Saharan Africa is playing a doomed game of catch-up. A more realistic, and more optimistic, picture, is that each country in Sub-Saharan Africa has its own set of challenges, and its own (perhaps halting) growth trajectory.

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Clothes infected by the Black Death being burnt in medieval Europe. An illustration from the 'Romance of Alexander' in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Sophie McBain is a freelance writer based in Cairo. She was previously an assistant editor at the New Statesman.

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Asia

18 November 2016

Curry in crisis, Bollywood bored of London: how India’s perceptions of Britain are changing

The cultural bond between India and the UK is unravelling, thanks to harsher visa rules and Brexit. We look to British Asians to find out more.

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Theresa May made her first post-Brexit diplomatic trip to India. Donning a flowing turquoise and gold sari, she was pictured walking through the temples of New Delhi barefoot – an effort that few national leaders would be likely to make.

This was a significant gesture. As Britain continues to debate what “Brexit” looks like, and with increasing anxiety over what the UK economy would look like after leaving the EU, May has been keen to indicate that Britain was “open for business”.

Back in London, Sanjay Shah, the owner of a small curry house in North London, sighed after reading about May’s visit to the subcontinent in an Indian newspaper (notably, her visit only filled a side column in the middle of the paper).

“She did nothing to promote small businesses like mine,” he says, adding that the Prime Minister was too busy “courting the rich from the cities”, referring to her visit to Bangalore, India’s booming version of Silicon Valley.

Shah is a committed Conservative. More Thatcherite than Cameronite, he joined the party in the mid-Eighties, in the belief that it was the Tory party that reflected the ethos of hard work and enterprise. And earlier this year, Shah voted to leave the EU, in the hope that Britain “would return back to the ethos of Margaret Thatcher”.

For Shah, this was particularly important for his business. The curry industry is worth more than £4bn annually, but for many restaurants, the ability to hire cooks and staff from South Asia has become particularly difficult, thanks to tighter visa restrictions brought in while Theresa May was Home Secretary.

The issue became a huge sticking point among many South Asian communities across the country, so much so that Priti Patel, one of the government’s most high-profile Asian ministers and a key figure in the Vote Leave campaign, promised to make the immigration system fairer for those outside the EU.

A few months after the Brexit vote, both Shah and the industry feel betrayed by the Prime Minister’s lack of commitment to bringing visa barriers down. “There are hundreds of restaurants closing every month,” Shah says. “I’m worried that I will also have to close down my business . . . I’ve spent 20 years working in it.”

It’s not just curry houses that are worried about Britain’s future with India. As the mood across the western world turns against immigration, British universities have also expressed concerns about the future of higher education funding.

Writing in the Times Higher Education supplement, University of Sheffield vice-chancellor Sir Keith Burnett warned May that her visa policy towards Indian students was “insulting” and had resulted in a 50 per cent decline in students choosing to study in the UK. That gap is likely to widen as universities in the EU look to take advantage of Britain’s Brexit woes by attracting talented Indian students.

Britain’s relationship with the subcontinent has long faltered. Foreign visas are partly responsible for this – the issue has been prevalent since David Cameron came into office in 2010 and, despite repeated pledges to reform the rules in order to attract more professionals, the system has only become more arcane.

But there’s also a wider cultural trend taking place in India, which could be profound in shaping its relationship with the UK. This can be best explained through Bollywood. The UK has long played a significant role in certain genres of Bollywood film, in depicting the metropolitan Indian.

Famous Seventies films including Purab Aur Paschim (“East and West”) and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (“The Braveheart will take the Bride”) both depict London as a land of hope and dreams for the transnational Indian. Other Bollywood films, including the smash hit Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham… (“Sometimes There’s Happiness, Sometimes There’s Sorrow”), set in 2001, depict distinctions between the old values of Indian parents against the metropolitan liberal values of their London-based children.

In recent years, however, the focus on London in Bollywood has depleted, and few major blockbusters have used the UK as their backdrop – opting instead for foreign locations in Australia, America and the Middle East, where the market for Bollywood continues to thrive. There is little research to suggest why this is the case, but it could be that London, and indeed the UK, may be becoming less important to modern Indians than it used to be.

Indeed, as India continues to grow, and its young metropolitans continue to flourish, new partnerships with the rest of the world may simply provide young Indians with more opportunity compared with an inward-looking Britain with growing anti-immigrant sentiment.

This has left Britain on the back foot – not just for its dealings with India, but for how it plans to negotiate with other non-EU countries on trade. During the EU referendum campaign, many on the Leave side harked back to the colonial era when talking about trade with India. The reality of modern India is far different from this nostalgic fantasy. Britain can seek to return to its former colony, but must realise that it is no longer the master, and is in no position to call the shots.

Hussein Kesvani is a journalist and the co-host of the No Country For Brown Men podcast. He tweets @HKesvani.