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This paper uses an instrumental variables approach to estimate the relationship between trade openness and economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. Instrumental variables estimates show that economic growth has a significant negative contemporaneous effect on trade openness, while trade openness has a significant positive effect on economic growth. A 1 percentage point increase in the ratio of trade over GDP is associated with a short-run increase in growth of approximately 0.5% in a given year; the cumulative long-run effect on the level of GDP per capita is larger, reaching about 2%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a recent surge in research on long-term African development. For this research agenda to be fruitful and its theories tested, it is crucial to have consistent estimates of economic change. However, there is a lack of reliable time series data for the colonial period in Sub-Saharan Africa. This article contributes new time series data for the Gold Coast and Ghana between 1890 and 2010 and in particular a new GDP time series for Ghana for the years 1891–1957. The series implies a sustained period of economic expansion from the late nineteenth century. This suggests a revision of some prevalent truths about the history of economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, and points the way forward for expanding the database to cover the colonial period for other African economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite recent improvements in economic performance, undernutrition rates in sub-Saharan Africa appear to have improved much less and rather inconsistently across the continent. We examine to what extent there is an empirical linkage between income growth and reductions of child undernutrition in Africa. We pool all DHS surveys for African countries, control for other correlates of undernutrition, and add country-level GDP per capita. We find that a 10 percent increase in GDP per capita is associated with 1.5 to 1.7 percent lower odds of being stunted, 2.8 to 3.0 percent lower odds of being underweight, and 3.5 to 4.0 percent lower odds of being wasted. Other drivers of undernutrition, including relative socioeconomic status and mother's education and her nutritional status, are quantitatively more important. This suggests that further increases in GDP will have only a modest impact on undernutrition and broader interventions are required to accelerate progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urbanization has traditionally been understood as a byproduct of economic development, but this explanatory framework fails to account for the phenomenon of 'urbanization without growth' observed in sub-Saharan Africa throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In light of this apparent anomaly, I argue that urbanization is better understood as a global historical process driven by population dynamics associated with technological and institutional innovations that have substantially improved disease control and food security in urban settlements across the globe. These innovations first emerged in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and were subsequently diffused through colonialism, trade, and international development assistance. A range of qualitative and quantitative evidence is presented to demonstrate that this historically grounded theory of urbanization offers a more convincing explanation for the stylized facts of Africa's urban transition-and hence the process of world urbanization more broadly-than the traditional economic account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]