, the outgoing Director of the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research of the University of Ghana, Legon has called on African governments to make good use of local research institutions and think tanks, instead of relying heavily on foreign ones.
He said the African growth agenda could be better articulated if local research institutions and think tanks were effectively used.
Prof. Aryeetey was speaking at the opening of a two-day international workshop on dissemination of research works and economic growth of the African continent in Accra yesterday.
The workshop was on the theme “Transforming Africa: From natural resources dependence to sustainable growth and development”.
The workshop which is taking place under the auspices of the African Growth Initiative (AGI) and the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, United States is aimed at creating a single voice for African economists, research groups and institutions in the United States and influencing debates in the international arena.
Prof. Aryeetey, who will be leaving office as Director of ISSER in January 2010, to become the Director of the Africa Growth Initiative at Brookings Institution, said African economies are faced a lot of challenges in their quest to grow faster and in a more sustainable manner.
He said the time had come for African governments to pay attention to the work of local research institutions and bodies to enhance the growth and development of the continent.
He pointed out that the recent fast growth in many African countries was mostly driven by a commodity boom that had been repeatedly unsustainable.
The challenge that African countries face is to determine what policies might allow them to use the benefits from their natural resource endowments to transform current economic structures.
He said the African Growth Initiative would focus its work on five thematic areas, in partnership with selected African policy research institutions.
The chosen thematic areas include macroeconomic management and the political economy of structure transformation. Other areas of interest are industrial policy, agricultural modernisation, natural resource management and social protection for poverty reduction.
Prof. Aryeetey indicated that these areas were chosen because they had been identified to be areas that offered the most challenge to policy makers in terms of how to access research. He also said that a lot of current research that was used in African policy making was derived from international settings and seldomly driven by country institutional contexts.
He maintained that African governments were usually more interested in what European and American economists said about growth and development in Africa than what their own economists were saying.
Other speakers at the workshop include Dr John Page who is a Senior Fellow of Brookings Institution and the former Chief Economist for Africa at the World Bank.
He spoke on “Industrial Policy for Structural Transformation”. Prof. Mwangi Kimenyi, also a Senior Fellow of Brookings and the Africa Growth Initiative, did a presentation on “the management of natural resources for structural transformation”.
Institutions that have been selected to partner with Brookings Institution in this endeavour include the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (Ghana), the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (Ibadan), the Development Policy Research Unit of the University of Cape Town, South Africa, the Kenya Institute of Public Policy Research and Analysis, the Economic Policy Research Centre (Uganda) and the Centre de Recherche Economique et Sociale of Senegal.
Other Ghanaian participants have also been drawn from the University of Ghana and major think tanks in the country.
The workshop is expected to conclude with a consensus on how to utilise resources that will be available through Brookings Institution for the purpose of establishing a greater voice for African researchers.
Author : Lloyd Evans
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