Abstract:
Over the past few decades, the pursuit of sustainable growth and development
has been the focus of economic policy in Africa. The challenges confronting
Africa range from poverty, unemployment, inequality, insufficient and
sometimes, inefficient public service provision, through to environmental
degradation. In attempting to solve these problems, African governments
have traditionally used a variety of policies: and it is upon the effectiveness
and efficiency of such policies that people’s livelihoods depend. However, the
practical implementation of a policy may not only fail to achieve the desired
outcomes, but may in fact unfairly privilege one group or sphere over another.
In this article, it is argued that in order to fully understand the effects of the
range of policies available to policy makers, as well as their interconnectivity
and cohesiveness, a valuable framework to use is the economy-wide analysis.
The article explains such a framework and exposes some applied studies that
have employed the framework in order to gain insights into policy analysis.
An advantage of the methodology is its quantitative nature which allows for
measurement of impacts. It is recommended that such methods ought to be part
of a toolkit for policy makers.
