We explore the effects of openness to trade on growth and the implications for income convergence in Africa. Fixed-effect estimation results indicate that the evidence on the direct impact of openness to trade on growth is mixed and there is no support for conditional convergence. On the other...

This paper focuses on the distribution impact from Senegal’s water reforms with emphasis on rates reforms. We first analyze the evolution of consumption patterns before and after the reforms. We found that most of the gains accrue to the highest income classes while the poor have seen little...

We show that the recognition of basic women’s rights in developing countries may have important positive spillovers on the whole sphere of labor market transactions, with more women seeking education and an overall lesser wage discrimination against women. A combination of basic women’s...

This paper uses Johansen’s cointegration methodology to estimate Sierra Leone’s money long-run demand function for the 1964-2005 period. It finds a stable long-run relationship between the quantity of real money balances and its determinants. Secondly, all the estimated coefficients have...

The study investigates how the incidence and severity of information and agency problems vary across firms and over time in Nigeria, and assesses the differential effects on corporate investment. A reduced form q-cash flow model and interaction approach was adopted to examine the effects of firm...

The epicenter of Nigeria’s deadly political violence is the clash for benefits from petroleum, more than 90 percent of which is produced in the Niger Delta (Ibaba, 2005). The sources of conflict in Nigeria include its ruling coalitions facing pressure from economic stagnation and the...

This paper argues that the missing link in the effort to resolve the Niger Delta crisis is the neglect of indigenous organizations. Scholars and policy makers have underplayed the role of self-organized institutions in the governance of community affairs in the Niger Delta. The fact that...

This paper analyzes the parallels in two conflict eras in the Niger Delta region with a view to highlighting how salient issues in the resolution of the old conflicts remain germane to contemporary conflicts. The first conflict era refers to the trade in palm oil during the nineteenth century...

Thomas Friedmann’s “First Law of Petro-Politics” expresses the idea that political freedoms diminish in oil-producing states in direct proportion to increases in the price of oil; there is a whole petro-lexicon purporting to capture the dilemma of oil: of the “paradox of plenty,” the...

This is a book review of "Emigration, Brain Drain and Development: The Case of Sub-Saharan Africa" by Arno Turner