Sub-Saharan Africa has seen a return to good economic growth performance in the last 15 years, and especially in the last 5–10 years; while this partly reflects the good performance of commodities, several other factors are also important. Focusing on 25 of the largest 26 countries in...

The Cotonou Agreement, successor to the Lomé Convention, offers African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries preferential access to EU markets by establishing economic partnership agreements (EPAs) between the EU and blocks of ACP countries that are members of regional trading arrangements....

This paper investigates how alternative real exchange rate measures might be used to date and measure trade liberalization. It proposes the use of domestic price data to construct separate real exchange rates for exportables and importables, in order to overcome the ambiguous information...

We build a micro-simulation model able to simulate over a 15 years' period the impact of AIDS on the distribution of income in Côte d'Ivoire. We focus on the labour supply effects of AIDS-induced mortality. We find that although the size of the economy in terms of total household income is...

The food crisis encountered in 2002 in Malawi was arguably one of the worst in the recent history of the country. The World Food Programme estimated that between 2.1 and 3.2 million people were threatened by starvation. Despite this assumed severity, not much research on the actual consequences...

Previous poverty assessments of Burkina Faso neglected some important methodological issues. They were therefore misleading and led to the so-called 'Burkinabè Growth--Poverty Paradox', i.e., increasing poverty despite sustained macro-economic growth and constant inequality. We estimate that...

While in many African countries open unemployment is largely confined to urban areas and thus overall rates are quite low, in South Africa open unemployment rates hover around 30%, with rural unemployment rates being even higher than that. This is despite the near complete absence of an...