The last two decades of the 20th century recorded a slowdown in the pace of progress of life expectancy at birth in most developing and transitional regions. The paper explores the causes of such trend on the basis of existing mortality theories. The results obtained through an eclectic...

This note draws on Polanyi's pendulum in economic policies presented in the the Great Transformation-with swings back and forth between strong restrictions on the market and market domination, each resulting from excesses of the dominant model. The swing he described, when he wrote, was a...

This introduction provides an overview of the special issue. The papers in this issue contribute to our understanding of the contrasting histories of Ghana and Nigeria. The papers confirm the importance of horizontal inequalities as a source of political instability and violent conflict, and...

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