Tyler Cowen: uncertainty

Transcript context

…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? I would say that Nigeria has been something of an outlier in terms of underperformance as a state which is densely populated by African standards. And as we all know, they had a terrible civil war there in the late 1960s. The ethnic divisions in Nigeria, even by African standards, are particularly acute. You have a nation which is broadly divided in three with roughly equal numbers among those three groups, and they’ve always fought for power with each other. So, the ethnic fragmentation problem has been particularly difficult in Nigeria. Nonetheless, I would say that the population density is what has allowed Nigeria to have a better performance in agriculture than most people expected over the last 20, 30 years, and has also contributed to the outperformance of the whole Lagos area on the coast, which is a real hive of entrepreneurial activity. So, I would agree with you that Nigeria doesn’t give great hope to us that greater population density across Africa is going to produce better results, but I would say that there are particular reasons within Nigeria that we can point to as to why Nigeria hasn’t delivered as much as one would hope so far.…

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