The need for more coordination in European development cooperation is acknowledged by most academics and practi-tioners. It emerges because there has been a strong increase in the level of fragmentation and proliferation of official development assistance (ODA) in recent years, despite the calls...

The distribution of global income is extremely unequal. In 2011, the richest 20 per cent of the world’s population controlled more than 80 per cent of the world’s income, compared to less than 2 per cent for the poorest 20 per cent. In many parts of the developing world, inequality remains...

The Cotonou Partnership Agreement (CPA), which governs relations between the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group and the European Union (EU), will expire in the year 2020. While the three pillars of this framework addressing political dialogue, development cooperation and trade are...

Conventional economic wisdom has long maintained that there is a necessary trade-off between pursuit of the efficiency of a system and any attempts to improve equity between participants within that system. Economist Robert Lucas demonstrated the implications of this common economic axiom when...

A country where an individual's chances of success depend little on the socio-economic success of his or her parents is said to be a country with high relative intergenerational mobility. A government's motivation for seeking to improve mobility is arguably two-fold. There is a fairness argument...

With inequality reduction now being officially and broadly recognised as a key development objective with its own Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 10), there is a need for simple, economical and quick methodologies with which to focus on this area and assess progress. This paper presents such a...

The development cooperation (DC) of the United Nations (UN) at the end of the 1990s can be described and assessed as follows: • The UN is an important pillar of multilateral DC. The organization is endowed with some fundamental presuppositions (universality, a high level of legitimation, good...

For sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) the year 2005 offers a number of important opportunities for political action (G8 summit; debate on the report on the Commission for Africa – CFA; review of the progress made on achieving the Millennium Development Goals – MDGs). On the one hand, this is a chance...

Sub-Saharan Africa comprises 48 states at various stages of social, economic and political development. Despite the heterogeneity of these countries, the following general developments relating to statehood and governance in the past 15 years can at least be identified: Such pan-African...