Surprising new patterns of structural transformation in Africa: a Q&A with Christopher Udry
by Greg Larson
March 25, 2024
Register to attend the 33rd Kuznets Memorial lecture in-person or online here.
The process of structural transformation is a hallmark of development economics: when economies shift away from agriculture towards manufacturing and services, this typically drives sustained economic growth, increased living standards, and poverty reduction.
The phenomenon is traditionally characterized by increasing productivity in agriculture as the primary sector of an economy, which then enables labor to be reallocated to other new and growing sectors – which in turn enables further increases in broad-based production and productivity. But what if a growing, developing economy shows signs of declining productivity in this key primary sector?
In a series of events on April 4 and 5 at Yale, economists will present new research on how our understanding of structural transformation in agriculture and its role in development is shifting.
The keynote event will be the annual Kuznets Memorial Lecture, delivered by Christopher Udry, the Robert E. and Emily King Professor of Economics at Northwestern University and Co-director of the Global Poverty Research Lab, whose research focuses on rural economic activity in sub-Saharan Africa.
“Since his time as a PhD student here at Yale, Chris Udry has undertaken path-breaking research on African economies, using insights from extensive fieldwork and a broad reading of African history and anthropology to enrich economic models,” said Rohini Pande, Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center. “We couldn’t be more excited for Chris’s Kuznets lecture on the evolving relationship between agricultural productivity and structural transformation in contemporary African economies.”
EGC recently spoke with Udry about his upcoming lecture, his recent research, and his journey as a development economist. His answers have been edited for length.
The title of your lecture is intriguing. What will you discuss?
I will be discussing some preliminary results from new research on agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa with my colleagues Sebastian Sardon, Doug Gollin from Tufts, and Thomas Bentze and Philip Wollburg from the World Bank. We analyze a really high-quality, plot-level dataset that aggregates survey data for nearly 60,000 farmers over a 10-15 year period across six countries: Ethiopia, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, and Tanzania. This gave us the opportunity to look and see if we could find any common trends and issues that emerge from this wealth of rich data.
But it was sort of depressing, because the most striking pattern we found was that agricultural yields have actually been systematically declining across these countries.