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Publications (16)
– Ownership, Incentives, and Capabilities
There is not a single African country that did not attempt public sector reforms in the 1990s. Governments no longer see themselves as sole suppliers of social services, frequently opting for partnerships with the private sector. Efficiency and choice have entered the language of the planning and...
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– An Overview of African Law
Insolvency and debt recovery procedures are as crucial to a well-performing financial sector as credit provision itself. They are even more important in Africa, where attempts are underway to create fully-fledged financial markets. For the financial system to be credible, creditors must be ensured...
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– On Factors Affecting Implementation
Although privatization has been a key feature of economic policy in Africa since the early 1990s its sequencing and intensity have varied from country to country, with donor leverage being an important determinant of the pace of implementation. However, although many privatization schemes were...
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The last twenty years has seen an extensive and exhausting debate on how to improve the institutions of African states. But progress has been patchy at best. Many of the problems arise from a ‘partial-reform equilibrium’; initial reforms are undertaken, but then strong resistance is encountered, and...
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Can African countries learn from the development experiences of other regions? Or are the continent’s development challenges unique? This paper looks at the development experience of the Nordic countries, especially Sweden, from the nineteenth century and discusses the extent to which the observed...
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– Recent Experiences
The recent emphasis on governance in Africa is unique in that it was initiated by donors and not by domestic leaders under pressure from their own constituencies. Thus while many countries have embraced the market economy and liberalized their policies, issues related to political participation...
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In developing countries, particularly in those countries that have experienced declining growth rates, institutional failure (bad policies) is closely related to development failure and growth collapses. This paper addresses the issues of commitment, compromise and rent seeking, all of which are...
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Following close to two decades of political distress and economic decline, Uganda embarked, in the mid 1980s, on far-reaching reforms under Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement. Decentralization was emphasized, with the new leaders highlighting the importance of proximity to policymakers...
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– Incentives, Governance and Accountability
Since the early 1990s, Malawi has tried to undertake economic reforms, including the restructuring of the public sector, even as it embraced democratic reforms. Paucity of human and financial resources has made the process difficult and drawn out. However, towards the end of the 1990s, the reforms...
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Africa’s formal economies responded poorly to economic reform measures in the 1980s and 1990s while informal markets and institutions responded dynamically and proved to be more resilient. Using comparative analysis of African informal economies, this study explains why this was the case. It...
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The move towards multiparty democracy in Zambia in the early 1990s was heralded as the beginning of a new era of more pluralist politics in Africa. The new government’s willingness to adopt economic reforms and policies, hitherto resisted, was also seen as a sign that henceforth African governments...
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Successive governments in Nigeria have introduced reforms aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the civil service. Still, the service remains inefficient and incapable of reforming itself, let alone the rest of the economy. Corruption has become an endemic feature of public sector...
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– Incentives, Reforms and Performance
The post-independence Mozambican civil service, what was left of it following the exodus of Portuguese settlers in the mid-1970s, was poorly educated, with low incentives. In subsequent years, the combination of a war-ravaged economy, poor human resources and mass poverty made it difficult for the...
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– A Comparative Study of Ghana and Tanzania
This paper compares reform ownership in Ghana and Tanzania over the past two decades. It finds that on several dimensions, Ghana’s early economic reforms enjoyed a high degree of ownership. That ownership was not embedded, however, in a politico-institutional framework that ensured that ownership...
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Kenya’s civil service expanded rapidly after independence, becoming by far the largest in East Africa. Following economic decline since the 1980s, however, it became difficult for the government to sustain a large and inefficient public sector. To raise efficiency, extensive civil service reforms...
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– Impact on Efficiency and Growth
This essay examines some outcomes of two decades of market oriented reforms in the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU). In general, economic performance, measured by growth of per capita incomes, has not been encouraging, despite far reaching reforms, including privatization...
Displaying 16 of 16 results