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Publications (27)
Recent years have seen a sustained research effort exploring the African development experience. The extant literature has offered a large set of explanations as to why the African development record has lagged behind that of other regions of the developing world. This new volume brings...
– An Overview
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 economies, consistent with ‘new institutionalism’; (2)...
Working Paper
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– Xenophobia in Post-Apartheid South Africa
In May 2008, South Africa became the theatre of widespread violent attacks against undesirable ‘outsiders’. Over 60 were killed, hundreds wounded, and tens of thousands displaced. This analysis aims at identifying the characteristics of the victims in an attempt to portray the ‘alien’ using...
Working Paper
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This paper investigates whether cyclical variation in women’s labour supply in Africa contributes to smoothing household consumption. We find little support for this hypothesis. Using comparable individual data on about 0.5 million women in 30 Sub-Saharan African countries merged with country level...
Working Paper
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Empirical studies have shown that trade agreements have different effects on countries based on their level of development, especially in trade potentials. There have been several trade agreements between North-South and South-South countries, which are accompanied with different outcomes based on...
Working Paper
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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 explain the role of aid in mitigating the adverse...
Working Paper
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– A case study of Liberia’s telecommunication laws
The telecommunications sector in Africa presents many exciting prospects to international investors—indeed many billion dollar projects are already underway across the continent. Many of the continent’s current problems can be traced to the exploitation it has experienced whilst ‘doing business’...
Working Paper
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Purposeful, well-targeted and successful transformation policies will be elusive for a country or region that does not understand the relative importance of its sectoral sources of growth. This study aims at eliciting our understanding in this respect by providing an assessment of the relative...
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– Growth and Distributional Aspects
The United Nations Millennium Declaration commits to halving extreme poverty between 2000 and 2015. The South African government has set a goal of halving poverty by 2014, although the meaning of this goal has not yet been defined. This article specifies government’s stated target of halving poverty...
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– The Case of Africa
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 be correlated with economic freedom, thus...
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– A Comparative Analysis of Domestic and Foreign Banks
Utilizing the stochastic frontier approach, this study conducts a comparative analysis of profit efficiency and cost inefficiency of commercial banks operating in 29 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries by bank ownership (domestic bank, SSA foreign bank or non-SSA foreign bank), as well as by the...
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The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of institutional reforms on the revival of African economies. We study the impact of positive changes in business environment indicators of the Doing Business project and the Economic Freedom Index of the Heritage Foundation on the private sector...
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– What Consequences for Economic Convergence?
This paper examines the link between health indicators, environmental variables, and economic development, and the consequences of this relationship on economic convergence. In the early stage of economic development, the gain from income growth could be cancelled or mitigated by environmental...
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– African Evidence from Panel Vector Autoregressive Framework
Using a panel vector autoregressive model this paper investigates the dynamic and endogeneous contribution of tourism to output based on a sample of 40 African countries for the period 1990–2006. Results from the study confirm tourism to be an important ingredient of African development although...
Journal Article
– Evidence from Tunisia
The purpose of this paper is to study the determinants of the inefficient functioning of the Tunisian labour market. The study takes advantage of the recent development in the stochastic frontier techniques and estimates, the matching function for Tunisia using disaggregated data.We include control...
Working Paper
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This paper investigates some of the existing hypotheses regarding the transmission of different colonial legacies to modern day economic growth. The fact that different colonial strategies were pursued by different colonizers in various territories suggests possible ramifications for current...
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