The paper investigates the question whether constitutions are a proxy for institutional quality. It provides a discussion of institutions and states that constitutions are an example of a formal institution. As any other formal institution, constitutions are also influenced by countries'...

"In this book Carmen Martinez-Vargas explores how academic participatory research and the way it is carried out can contribute to more, or less, social justice. Adopting theoretical and empirical approaches, and addressing multiple complex, intersectional issues, this book offers inspiration for...

Taking German Cameroon as an example, this article uses the concept of the colonial intermediary to analyze Africans' role in colonial capitalism. While researchers have shown that the colonial state depended on Africans, the importance of African intermediaries in European trade has hardly been...

Reducing Africa's dependence on Asian rice imports requires tailoring local rice products to food markets that are segmented by cultural heritage of ancient rice domestication and colonial heritage of more recent import substitution policies. Using experimental auctions, we examine quality...

This volume offers two important contributions to the literature on sovereign debt. First, it provides a unique genealogy of debt collection practices in terms of their availability, acceptability and efficacy. We argue that creditors’ tactics and methods to enforce debt repayment emerged and...

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) was colonised for about a century by the British, French and other European countries. Therefore, we examine these forms of colonisation on accounting development in Africa. We use a description-explanatory approach to show how three forms of colonisation have driven the...

Between 2000 and 2016, China and the UK acquired large areas of land through investment projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. Illustrated by numerous rich and nuanced empirical accounts of such projects, Ariane Goetz explains the global phenomenon of "land grabbing" from the perspective of two...

Breeders face the challenging task of tailoring crop varieties to complex consumer preferences shaped through culture and history. The Casamance rice sector in Senegal is an interesting case; while the region is endowed with a 3,000-year-old cultural heritage of African rice domestication, it has...

This paper assesses the role of ideas in economic change, combining economic and historical analysis with insights from psychology, sociology and anthropology. Belief systems shape the system of categories ("pre-confirmatory bias") and perceptions (confirmatory bias), and are themselves...