This paper builds on the case of West African banks to propose an analysis of the issues raised by government interference, privatisation to foreign investors and regulation in developing countries. In the late 1980s, there was a severe crisis in the West African banking system, partly due to...

This paper is a significant addition to the recent literature that analyses empirically the impact of macroeconomic instability on long-term growth, using cross-country regression analysis, as well as complementing it with additional monographic analysis. The analysis performed here is broadly...

This paper brings out that poverty increased massively in the wake of the 1994 devaluation of the CFA franc, despite a significant recovery of economic growth. Although this increase affected all the social groups, it fell mostly on the urban poor. An analytical model is presented, which...

This paper reviews some of the microeconomic evidence concerning migration and remittances in Africa. After a brief survey of the literature, it draws some lessons from two surveys performed in the Senegal River valley in Mali and in Senegal. The paper makes two main points. First, migration...

This paper presents a theoretical framework for understanding the reforms that occurred in the CFA franc zone in the 1980s and 199Os, focusing on public debt and the exchange rate. It analyses the real-side adjustment strategy that was adopted initially. It shows how the debt problem and...

A positive relation between wheat production and the level of the agricultural minimum wage in Morocco is explained by applying a version of Stigler's (1946) monopsony model. The resulting econometric equation passes a large number of tests on Moroccan data over 1971-89. A model of the...

A simple model is set up to analyse the tradeoff between wage and monitoring costs in an efficiency-wage framework. It is then applied to a panel of firms in the Ivorian manufacturing sector, split in different industries. The parameter restrictions derived from the theoretical model are not...

A typical pattern of wealth redistribution seems to prevail, in some African countries, between rich and poor ethno-regional groups. A contract-theoretic model is presented for shedding some light on this phenomenon. The government promises a transfer to its potential opponent in return for not...

Before discussing the type of institutions that can be designed for overcoming the credibility problem raised by monetary policy, this paper defines macroeconomic instability, showing that inflation is a crucial factor. The relationships between inflation and macroeconomic instability are...