Abstract

There has been increasing interest on the apparent underrepresentation of African-based scholars in economics scholarship on Africa. Much of this debate, however, proceeds with little by way of evidence in demonstrating whether such an underrepresentation actually exists in the first place. In this paper, I look at the patterns of authorship over the period 2005–2015 in ‘leading’ economics journals that publish regularly on Africa. I find that, on average, only 25 per cent of the journal articles published on Africa had at-least one African-based author over this period. Further, I find that whereas the journals I consider dedicate about 30 per cent of their content on Africa, only 3 per cent of their editorial boards are based on the continent. These patterns likely account for the dismal state of the discipline’s knowledge about the continent.

摘要

人们对基于非洲的学者在有关非洲的经济学研究中的代表性明显不足表示了越来越多的兴趣。然而，大多数辩论在证明这种代表性不足是否真正存在的过程中，几乎没有证据。在本文中，我研究了定期出版于非洲的“领先”经济学期刊在2005-2015年期间的作者格局。我发现，在此期间，在非洲发表的平均期刊文章中，至少有25％的作者来自非洲。此外，我发现，尽管我认为这些期刊将其内容的约30％专门用于非洲，但其编辑委员会中只有3％是基于非洲大陆。这些模式可能解释了该学科对非洲大陆知识的低迷状态。