Joe Studwell: evaluation

Transcript context

…I have many questions about Africa. If lack of population density has been a major problem, does that mean we should now be especially optimistic about the Nigerian Delta, which is densely populated? Yes, you’re right. The Nigerian Delta is more densely populated than most parts of Africa. And it reminds us that population density or increased population density alone is not enough to solve all of Africa’s problems, because Nigeria’s been a country plagued with problems since independence. But Nigeria has also been looking in much better shape in the last 20 years compared with the period before that since independence. I would argue that a big part of that is increased population density. More broadly, across Africa, there’s no doubt that very low population density has been the biggest problem for the continent’s development, contrary to what the academic literature has told us for the last 50 years, which was that it’s all to do with governance and civil war and civil strife and ethnic strife. In reality, the biggest problem that Africa has had — and largely as a result of the disease burden on the continent, which is absolutely unique in its virulence — is having population density, which in 1960 was one-fifth that of Asia as a whole and one-seventh what it was in East Asia. But is it the case Nigeria has relatively done so well compared to the rest of Africa? They have oil, of course, and they have remarkable talent in the population. And relative to oil and talent, it seems to me, on average, they quite underperform. I see so many years where they grow 1 percent or maybe zero, or you’re not sure because someone’s fudging the numbers. Why should we think the population density matters if the number one example of that underperforms?…

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