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Publications (18)
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In many African countries, decentralization has long been viewed as a means for improving local service delivery. Yet, despite various decentralization initiatives, poor service delivery continues to be problematic in two of Kenya’s largest cities, Nairobi and Mombasa. Despite various governance...
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– Does Politics Matter?
This study examines the role of politics on decentralization and service delivery in South Africa, with a specific focus on Johannesburg and Cape Town. The research delineates how national decentralization has affected service delivery responsibilities and resources, determines whether service...
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Uganda, like other African countries, has implemented reforms to decentralize political authority to local governments and reintroduce multiparty elections. This combination creates opportunities for national partisan struggles to emerge in local arenas and influence local service delivery. This...
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Sub-Saharan African cities have been growing at historically unprecedented rates. Since the early 1970s, they have welcomed international assistance involving a succession of major thematic objectives. The main agency involved in urban assistance has been the World Bank. But as its goals have...
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– Property, Politics and Development Trajectories
As institutional approaches have come to dominate the mainstream of development economics, they have outgrown earlier and simpler analyses of ‘property rights’. This paper focuses on the work of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson, which suggests that the distribution of property rights to a ‘broad...
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– The Successful Experience of Switzerland (1870-1950)
This research paper discusses the role of institutions in the rapid growth and successful international integration of Switzerland during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In analysing the emergence and consolidation of the institutions whose existence was crucial, the paper looks...
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– Industrial Catching-up, Institutional Innovation and Financial Fragility
This paper seeks to explain the dynamics of Brazilian industrial catch-up in the last 60 years by discussing its background institutional conditions as well as its main macroeconomic features. After a brief introduction, the second section describes how after the institutional innovations introduced...
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– A Historical Perspective on Institutions and Uneven Development
This paper argues for an ‘ancient’ institutional school, predating Thorstein Veblen’s ‘old’ institutionalism. In this view, going back as far as the thirteenth century, institutions tended to be seen as specific to a mode of production. Here both institutions and development itself are context...
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– Development Strategies and Institutions in Taiwan and China
Conventional explanations of Taiwan and China’s economic success point to the shift from an import-substituting industrialization (ISI) strategy to an export-oriented industrialization (EOI) strategy. This paper argues that the development strategies in Taiwan and China have always been a...
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New institutional economics lacks a theory of state formation which could help us to deal with the mega question of why some states became more efficient than others at establishing and sustaining institutions. Some kind of middle range theory could be formulated based upon historical case studies...
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Taxation provides one of the principal lenses in measuring state capacity, state formation and power relations in a society. This paper critically examines three main approaches (economic, administrative and political economy) to understanding taxation. It also examines differences in tax...
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– A Comparative Analysis of Mauritius, Botswana and Uganda
This paper examines the relationship between institution building and economic performance in Mauritius, Botswana and Uganda. The rationale for comparing these cases is simple. While the three have been super-economic stars in their own right, they have achieved substantially different outcomes...
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During its development into a continental empire, the US, like other countries relied on the investment of capital and labour from abroad; unlike other countries, the US had a peculiar political institution, federalism, which channeled these resources and also determined the course of protest...
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The notion that good corporate governance means maximizing shareholder value derives from the neoclassical theory of the market economy. I explain why this perspective is highly problematic for understanding the operation and performance of the business corporation and hence the institutions that...
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– Some Key Theoretical Issues
The paper tries to improve our understanding on the role of institutions in development by critically examining the current orthodox discourse on institutions and highlighting some of its key problems. After discussing some definitional problems, the chapter examines a number of problems in the...
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In the last two decades, there has been a global sea change in the theory and practice of central banking. The currently dominant ‘best practice’ approach to central banking consists of the following: (1) central bank independence (2) a focus on inflation fighting (including adopting formal...
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