Belinda Archibong

IEA: Can you tell us how you got interested in economics and decided to pursue an academic career?

Belinda: I immigrated to the US from Nigeria with my family at the age of 12, and we went from living a relatively stable middle-class lifestyle to really struggling financially in the US. My mother worked extremely hard to get her law degree and was the first to go to university in her family, but found that foreign degrees didn’t translate to the US and was having to start from scratch in America, while raising 3 kids on her own. While we struggled financially, I was fortunate to have a mother who valued quality education for her children and invested significantly in our schooling. These events really crystallized my understanding of the role of arbitrariness of country of origin and gender, race, ethnicity and family and how all this affects peoples’ economic outcomes in ways often beyond their control. I thought that was unfair, and I remember being 12 and thinking, ‘how does this happen?’. This sparked my interest in studying economic inequality, and after taking my first introductory class at Columbia University as an undergraduate, I decided that economics was the best way to answer the questions I’d been thinking about since I was 12 and figure out what policies work to reduce inequality and improve economic outcomes for all- to make economic outcomes less arbitrary.

IEA: Your work brings a historical dimension to discussions of development, inequality, and political economy. Can you tell us briefly what you have learned from your research about the historical origins of underdevelopment in contemporary Africa?

Belinda: There’s a quote I like from the philosopher Brian Barry’s book “Why Social Justice Matters”, that I have posted on my office and home walls to remind me about why I study economics and focus on studying inequality within economics- “Social institutions perpetuate cumulative inequality. If there is any determinism involved, it is political”. A key theme in my research on the effects of colonial and postcolonial era institutions on economic development in Africa, is understanding the incentives of governments and individuals, and how those incentives affect the decisions they make with consequences for both concurrent and long-term economic inequality and development. I do this through principal-agent frameworks that take seriously the role of power, particularly social, political and labor market power, in framing the choice sets, strategies and actions these actors take. A key implication of my work is that the distribution of power among various actors can lead to multiple, realized equilibria reflected in heterogeneous, and persistent effects of historical institutions on group-based inequality and economic development. My research on prison labor, precolonial centralization, Washington Consensus policies and protests all illustrate this, and point to the importance of corrective, redistributive policies to address and reduce economic inequality, and improve development outcomes.

IEA: You have worked on the effects of the Covid pandemic in Nigeria. What do you think were the most important obstacles to a more effective pandemic response? 

Belinda: My research has focused on the effects of epidemics, and meningitis epidemics, endemic in Africa, on human capital development outcomes. A recurring theme in my work is on the effects of epidemics in worsening group-based inequality in human capital outcomes, especially among more vulnerable populations like women. We also have research showing that policy interventions like health aid and mobile calling credits that allow households to smooth consumption and improve communication during the pandemic significantly improve human capital outcomes. So, we know the effects of these types of epidemics and the policy interventions needed to mitigate their effects, and many stakeholders in Nigeria and other African countries are also aware of them. Nigeria, like many other African countries has dealt with past epidemics from meningitis to Ebola prior to the COVID pandemic, and the Nigerian CDC took admirable measures to implement many policies, that were instrumental in keeping caseloads and mortality rates low in Nigeria and throughout Africa. There are key financing obstacles currently that prevent widescale adoption of the kind of health aid and communication credits interventions, that we know from the research, work to mitigate the negative effects of the pandemic on households. This is where large scale, targeted, coordinated financing from the international community would be useful as well as I’ve mentioned previously.