Recent evidence from an exhaustive political-economy study of growth of African economise - the Growth Project of the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) - suggests that 'policy syndromes' have substantially contributed to the generally poor growth in sub-Saharan Africa during...

Housing was the major domestic priority of all postwar UK governments.  By 1970 the physical conditions of British housing had been transformed; by the 1990s seventy per cent of households in England owned their own homes.  Yet in 2012 there were still parts of many cities that deserved labeling...

In this paper I build an equilibrium search model of the urban Tanzanian labour market that explains the choice between wage and self-employment and the variation in earnings across and within these sectors.  Self-employment is very common in urban Tanzania and survey data show both that there...

The classical Chow (1960) test for structural instability requires strictly exogenous regressors and a break-point specified in advance.  In this paper we consider two generalisations, the 1-step recursive Chow test (based on the sequence of studentized recursive residuals) and its supremum...

In the vast majority of low-income countries, financing and political constraints have traditionally impaired the usefulness of fiscal policy as a short-run stabilization device. Indeed, it is widely recognized that fiscal policy in such countries has very often tended to be pro-cyclical. While...

Western governments typically pay out some 30 percent of GDP for social purposes.  This is financed by taxation on a pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) basis.  How efficient are these transfers, and can market or other mechanisms do it better?  The problem arises since no individual stands alone.  During...

Motivated by a simple model, I use DHS data to test nine hypotheses about the prevalence and decline of African polygamy.  First, greater female involvement in agriculture does not increase polygamy.  Second, past inequality better predicts polygamy today than does current inequality.  Third,...

This report considers alternative exchange rate arrangements for EAC countries in the transition to a monetary union.  Four main considerations shape our analysis.  First, while existing exchange rate policies differ in some important ways across the EAC, the Partner States have expressed a...

Bad ethics can make for bad economic outcome.  Bad ethics are defined hedonically as the infliction of pain on others for private advantage.  The infliction of pain is often justified by 'Just World Theories', which state that everyone gets what they deserve.  Market liberalism (and its...

Adam Smith rejected Mandeville's invisible-hand doctrine of 'private vices, public benefits'.  In The Theory of Moral Sentiments his model of the 'impartial spectator' is driven not by sympathy for other people, but by their approbation.  Approbation needs to be authenticated, and in Smith's...