Using panel data this paper examines the effects of institutions on the success of reforms and integration in the Maghreb. Institutional quality measures are developed using fuzzy-set based transformations of civil liberties and political rights. We posit that these transformations are quite...

The list of illness afflicting Angolan society is a long one: political instability, civil war, macroeconomic mismanagement, and the desperation born of poverty. A profound sense of uncertainty afflicts all levels of society - the government (and its opponents), entrepreneurs and rural and urban...

Contemporary civil wars are rooted in a partial or complete breakdown of the social contract, often involving disputes over public spending, resource revenues, and taxation. A feasible social contract gives potential rebels something akin to a transfer. When this is improbable, and the potential...

The last twenty years has seen an extensive and exhausting debate on how to improve the institutions of African states. But progress has been patchy at best. Many of the problems arise from a ‘partial-reform equilibrium’; initial reforms are undertaken, but then strong resistance is...

Using panel data, this paper explores the effects of openness to international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth. Fixed-effect and adjusted fixedeffect (regional-effect) estimations yield results consistent with the hypothesis of conditional convergence. FDI has a...

Using data from developing countries, this paper explores the nature and direction of the links between ICT diffusion and per capita income, trade and financial indicators, education, and freedom indicators. Internet hosts, Internet users, personal computers and mobile phones represent...

Political violence, coup d’état, civil wars and inter-state wars, all have fiscal dimensions (and sometimes fiscal causes). Who gets what—public employment and public spending—and who has to pay for it, are questions that raise fundamental issues about the distribution of society's...

War provides economic opportunities, such as the capture of valuable natural resources, that are unavailable in peacetime. However, belligerents may prefer low-intensity conflict to total war when the former has a greater pay-off. The paper therefore uses a two-actor model to capture the...

The paper reports an empirical study of the factors affecting burden sharing among OECD’s 22 DAC members in ‘bankrolling’ the multilateral aid agencies. These are the UN agencies, World Bank’s IDA and non-IDA programmes, regional development banks, European Community, and other...