Journal Article
Institutions and African Economies
This article presents an overview of the current special issue ‘Institutions and African Economies’. The findings include: (1) greater prevalence of democratic regimes improved both agricultural productivity and the overall growth of African...
Journal Article
Opposition Parties and the Urban Poor in African Democracies
Africa’s urban poor increasingly represent a key constituency for electoral mobilization. Opposition parties, which are pivotal for democratic consolidation, have nevertheless exhibited disparate success at obtaining votes from this constituency. To...
Working Paper
The Impact of Democracy on Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1982-2012
Does democracy promote economic growth? There is still an ongoing debate over the economic implications of democracy, and this question has gained critical importance particularly in the African context, where a wave of democratization in the early...
Working Paper
Backsliding and reversal
Ian Bremmer published a treatise on the stability of states built on the notion that states fall along a curve resembling a slanted “J” when plotting their stability against openness. States in the turnover process are considered unstable, and are at...
Working Paper
Gender Difference in Support for Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa
Little investigation has been made to explain why women are less likely than are men to support democracy in sub-Saharan Africa. This gender difference in politics has been found in numerous studies and may hinder the much needed legitimation of...
Working Paper
South Africa’s Emerging Black Middle Class
South Africa has seen a significant increase in the size of the black middle class in the post-apartheid period, but the attitudinal consequences of indicators of the middle class, as of 2011, are inconsistent and modest in size. While members of the...
Book Chapter
Benin - a pulverized party system in transition
Benin has seen a rapid proliferation of political parties since the country’s democratic transition in 1990. Recent counts suggest that over a hundred political parties are registered in this nation of just over 9 million people. No single party...
Journal Article
Political participation of Africa’s youth
The youth have long represented an important constituency for electoral mobilization in Africa. Yet, despite their numerical importance and the historical relevance of generational identities within the region, very little is really known about the...
Working Paper
Formal Bureaucracy and the Emergent Forms of the Informal Economy
The following essay has three parts. The first is a story about fluctuations in the balance of the relationship between impersonal and personal principles of social organization. This draws heavily on Max Weber’s interpretation of western history...
Working Paper
Aid Effectiveness and Selectivity
This paper surveys recent research on aid and growth. It also provides an overview of research on inter-recipient aid allocation. The overall focus of the paper is on the relevance of these issues for poverty-efficient aid, defined as a pattern of...
Book Chapter
The Impact of Democracy on Economic Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, 1982-2012
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 1.
Working Paper
Democracy clusters and patterns of inequality
This paper employs k-means clustering, a multidimensional pattern recognition method, to categorize countries using information from five Varieties of Democracy indices. K-means country clusters are similar but not entirely identical to both k...
Working Paper
The legacy of Mexico’s Drug War on youth political attitudes
We investigate the impact of childhood exposure to organized criminal violence on sociopolitical attitudes in Mexico, where an entire generation of youths has been raised amid the country’s most violent conflict over the past century. We fielded an...
Working Paper
The legacies of authoritarian repression on civil society
In this paper we examine the legacies on civil society of routine repressive activities carried out by authoritarian regimes, such as the targeting of opposition organizations. We focus on participation in voluntary associations in post-authoritarian...
Working Paper
Theorizing revolution in democracies
Scholarly logic holds that revolutionary movements are unlikely to break out in democracies, where citizens may simply remove unpopular leaders through elections. And yet the twenty-first century has witnessed a global series of uprisings against...
Working Paper
Good institutions and tax revenue outcomes in resource-rich countries
Developing countries that experience commodity booms struggle to mobilize sustainable tax revenues. Emerging literature on the subject notwithstanding, there is limited exploration of the specific types of institutions critical for improving fiscal...
Background Note
Review of sub-national institutional performance in Ghana
IntroductionThe literature on the concept, measurement, causes, and correlates of sub-national institutional governance is not new. From the seminal work of Putnam et al. (1993) to recent attempts by Iddawela et al. (2021), several authors have...
Working Paper
Clientelism and governance
Unlike much of the growing literature on political clientelism, this short paper contains mainly the author’s general reflections on the broad issues of governance (or mis-governance including corruption), democracy, and state capacity that...
Working Paper
Aid's impact on democracy
This paper investigates the impact of foreign aid on democratic outcomes using a panel of countries for the period between 1995 and 2018. In so doing, it speaks to a major critique of foreign aid, which is that it negatively impacts democratic...
Book Chapter
Does Foreign Aid Support Democracy Development?
This study revisits the effect of aid on the quality of institutions and examines the effects of a major source of instability, namely terms-of-trade instability, on the quality of democracy. We take advantage of previous empirical findings which...
Book
Democratic Trajectories in Africa
Despite impressive economic growth rates over the last decade, foreign aid still plays a significant role in Africa's political economies.This book asks when, why, and how foreign aid has facilitated, or hindered, democratization in sub-Saharan...
Journal Article
Democracy and growth in Africa
Estimating a 1975–2004 decadal panel data in an augmented production-function framework, the paper finds that indexes of electoral competitiveness exhibit U-shape relationships with GDP growth, implying quite different “intermediate” and “advanced”...
Journal Article
Aid Effectiveness and Selectivity: Integrating Multiple Objectives into Aid Allocations
This paper reports on recent work on improving the effectiveness of aid allocations, and extends the scope of analysis beyond the aid-policy-growth-poverty linkages to include three new elements: a broader range of poverty-relevant objectives and...
Working Paper
The corruption–growth relationship
Corruption is widely believed to negatively affect economic growth. However, many East and Southeast Asia countries either achieved or currently are achieving impressively rapid economic growth despite widespread corruption — the ‘East Asian Paradox’...
Annual Lecture
Development research and changing priorities
In 2015 WIDER Annual Lecture 19 was given by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. He discussed the overall challenge of sustainable and human-focused development including new and old challenges. Much progress has been made on the old issues of poverty and...
Working Paper
Constitution Writing and Conflict Resolution
Over 1975-2003 nearly 200 new constitutions were drawn up in countries at risk of conflict, as part of peace processes and the adoption of multiparty political systems. The process of writing constitutions is considered to be very important to the...
Working Paper
The state and development
Using a comparative frame that draws on the variation of developmental trajectories in Asia from Northeast Asia to China to Southeast Asia and to India, this paper explores the changing role of the state in these countries and the contributions that...
Working Paper
The New Global Determinants of FDI Flows to Developing Countries
Foreign direct investment (FDI) has increased dramatically in recent years. However, the distribution of FDI is highly unequal and very poor countries face major difficulties in attracting foreign investors. This paper investigates the determinants...
Journal Article
The heterogeneous effect of oil discoveries on democracy
This paper evaluates the existence of a resource curse on political regimes using the Synthetic Control Method. Focusing on 12 countries, we compare their democracy level with the weighted democracy level of countries that have not experienced oil...
Working Paper
Development in Chile 1990-2005
Chile, in the last 15 years, has shown remarkable results in terms of growth, poverty reduction and democratic governance. This paper reviews the structural changes that were behind these positive outcomes, as well as the pending challenges for Chile...
Working Paper
Oil discoveries and democracy
We evaluate the effect of natural resources on political regimes. We use the synthetic control method to compare evolution of the democracy level of countries affected by giant oil discoveries with the weighted democracy level of countries that do...
Working Paper
Separate but Equal Democratization?
Many commentators have noted the existence of a historical correlation between cities and democratization. This image of the city as an inherently civic space is linked to the notion that the spatial concentration intrinsic to urban contexts promotes...
Working Paper
Does Foreign Aid Promote Democracy?
This study revisits the effect of aid on the quality of institutions and examines the effects of a major source of instability, namely terms-of-trade instability, on the quality of democracy. We take advantage of previous empirical findings which...
Working Paper
A Re-examination of the Relation between Democracy and International Trade
Scholars and policy makers believe that democracy will bring prosperity through integration into the global economy via increased international trade. This study tests two theories as to why democracies might trade more. First, political freedom may...