S4 Ep9: Structural change in sub-Saharan Africa

Recorded at the 2025 annual conference of the Structural Transformation and Economic Growth Programme, held at the University of Oxford.

We have a mental model of structural transformation, and we have decades of empirical data to test our ideas about how that process works. But does it happen in the same way everywhere? This question has been hard to answer, not least because in some parts of the Global South, data has been easier to locate that in others. New research uses macro and trade data on from Sub-Saharan Africa to analyse whether its development follows those familiar patterns. Tim Phillips spoke to two of the authors: Gaaitzen de Vries of the University of Groningen and Kei-Mu Yi of the University of Houston, and the Dallas Fed.