Most of the literature about Africa's growth, "Africa Rising", "Lions on the Move", etc., refer to the present or the future. An oft-quoted World Bank report said, "Africa could be on the brink of an economic takeoff, much like China was 30 years ago and India 20 years ago."
Meanwhile, Alwyn Young has recently published a paper that claims that per-capita consumption on the continent has been growing at 3.4-3.7 percent a year for the last two decades--about three to four times the growth rates documented in other studies. Instead of using national accounts data (which, as we know, suffer from several deficiencies), Alwyn adopts the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), which calculate the households' ownership of assets and other indicators of well-being (ownership of a car or bicycle; material of the house floor; birth, death or illness of a child, etc.).
Employing a variety of econometric techniques (including some robustness checks and sensitivity analyses), he then calculates an asset index across the various components of the DHS. Assuming a constant relationship among assets, educational attainment and consumption, he ...
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