This paper examines the big questions of African comparative politics. It assesses the interaction of three crucial components in the development of the continent: law, democracy and quality of government. Political regimes of democracy, polity and autocracy are instrumented with income-levels,...

Microeconomic flexibility, by facilitating the process of creative-destruction, is at the core of economic growth in modern market economies. The main reason for why this process is not infinitely fast is the presence of adjustment costs, some of them technological, others institutional. Chief...

Historically, Chile has been an economy dominated by mineral and agro-industrial products and subject to frequent external shocks particularly in copper prices. Since the 1980s, the authorities have developed various mechanisms to cope with these shocks and dampen their effects on the domestic...

Securing central bank independence (CBI) is considered a vital and common practice in a large number of countries, since this independence is often associated with favorable economic performance, and it isolates monetary policy from the distortions of political business cycles, associated with...

This paper sets out the text and translations of over sixty of the world's general anti-avoidance rules. General anti-avoidance rules are found in taxation statutes. Known as “GAARs”, they are perhaps the most intractable of all statutory provisions, challenging alike to policy-makers,...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the “resource curse” phenomenon, i.e. the negative impact of oil abundance on long-term economic growth, for a set of oil exporting countries. It distinguishes between two potential drivers of resource courses: oil dependence and oil price...

This paper examines interconnections between law, politics and the quality of government in Africa. We investigate whether African democracies enjoy relatively better government quality compared to their counterparts with more autocratic inclinations. The empirical evidence is based on...

The UN Declaration of 24 September 2012 reaffirming the commitment of Heads of State and Government to the Rule of Law reflects the current uneasiness accompanying the application of just the concept. This short paper argues that it is due to discrepancies in its worldwide understanding and to...

Almost everyone can agree that the original connection of intellectual property to trade was for purely economically instrumental purposes but few would have predicted its other consequences, particularly the reshaped relationship of intellectual property’s innovation mandate to the production...

Scholars have examined the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) definition, development, and application of amateurism (Allison, 2001; Byers, 1995; Crowley, 2006; Falla, 1981; Glader, 1978; Sack & Staurowsky, 1998; Smith, 1993; Thelin, 1996; Watterson, 2000; Wheeler, 2004), but the matter of amateurism as it...