The role of institutions in Asian development has been intensely contested since Myrdal's Asian Drama, with later contributions from institutional economics and developmental state theory. Despite much progress, the dominant approaches do not agree about the institutions that matter nor do they...

To predict economic success and failure, academics and policymakers alike are interested in the differences in institutional structures across natural resource-based economies. This paper uses a political economy framework to examine the effect of institutional variables on per capita...

The paper explores the paths towards building institutional foundations for inclusive development in Sub-Saharan Africa. Viewing institutional configurations as a system of multiple equilibria, the concepts of endogenous institutions and institutional changes are used to address the question of...

In many low-income transition countries, where formal institutions such as courts do not function effectively, informal institutions are often used by firms to minimize transaction risks. We examine the role of informal institutions, in the forms of relational contracting and social networks, in...

We analyse policy makers' incentives to fight corruption under different institutional qualities. We find that 'public officials', even when non-corrupt, significantly distort anti-corruption institutions by choosing a lower detection probability when this probability applies to their own...

Developing countries that experience commodity booms struggle to mobilize sustainable tax revenues. Emerging literature on the subject notwithstanding, there is limited exploration of the specific types of institutions critical for improving fiscal capacity in resourcerich contexts. This paper...

In the light of Mozambique's natural resources boom-especially its large-scale investments in mining, oil, and gas-this paper analyses the prospects for the extractive industries to contribute to economic transformation from an institutional perspective. To this purpose, we address the...

With the introduction of the economic reforms in the late 1980s, the opening up of the political arena and the end of the civil war in the early 1990s, the decentralization process began in Mozambique. Different research developed in recent years shows that, as is the case in other countries in...

The notion that foreign aid harms the institutions of recipient governments remains prevalent. We combine new disaggregated aid data and various metrics of political institutions to re-examine this relationship. Long-run cross-section and alternative dynamic panel estimators show a small...

While the short-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on lives and livelihoods are well understood, we know little about the effect of the pandemic for longer-term outcomes such as corruption. We look at the historical data on political and economic crises to assess what we can learn from the...