Financial crises frequently increase public sector borrowing and threaten some form of sovereign debt crisis. Until recently, high income countries were thought to have become less vulnerable to severe banking crises that have lasting negative effects on growth. Since 2007, crises and attempted...

We conducted a survey covering 20% of villages with 200-1000 population in rural Guinea-Bissau. We interviewed household heads, care-givers of children, and their teachers and schools. We analysed results from 9,947 children, aged 7-17, tested for literacy and numeracy competency. Only 27% of...

Studies of African economic development frequently focus on the daunting challenges the continent faces. From recurrent crises to ethnic conflicts and long-standing corruption, a raft of deep-rooted problems has led many to regard the continent as facing many hurdles to raise living standards....

In countries with weak legal systems, there is a great deal of tunnelling by the entrepreneurs who control publicly traded firms. However, under some conditions entrepreneurs prop up their firms, i.e., they use their private funds to benefit minority shareholders. We provide evidence and a model...

We develop a simple firm-based automaton model for global economic interdependence of countries using modern notions of self-organized criticality and recently developed dynamical renormalization-group methods. We demonstrate how extremely strong statistical correlations can naturally develop...