Development economics struggles to account for the colonial question in Africa. It typically ignores the colonial question. MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and Harvard University economist James Robinson try to address this challenge in the book, Why Nations Fail (2012), but they end up simply using colonial experiences to make quotidian economic arguments about Africa’s ‘failed states’. The problem is not just about the limitations of econometrics or the unreliability of the statistics as Morten Jerven argues in Africa: Why Economists Get it Wrong (2015). Rather, as political economists such as J.K. Galbraith and Poly Hill respectively show in The Nature of Mass Poverty (1979) and Development Economics on Trial (1986), the dominant methodologies and ontologies in development economics are deeply problematic. Not only do they misunderstand their core subject matter, they are also fraught with mistakes in transcending the challenge of African development.

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Keywords

Decolonizing,Developement