About fifty years after the independence of most former colonies on the African continent, books on African nationalism again rank high on the agenda of the international academic discussion. A selection of three recent publications demonstrates the advances made in scholarly analysis in the...

This article is based on field studies in rural West Africa. It concentrates on the socio-structural effects of development aid in the long run, in contrast to numerous available evaluation reports on the short-run effects of development projects. The study reveals that superficial...

There exists a longstanding discussion of the role of the informal economy in the development process of Third World countries, notably in Africa. Much of the controversy was concerned with the question whether the informal sector promotes development or should rather be considered as a barrier...

Recent theoretical literature suggests that aid, geography, and resource endowments affect diversification of exports in Africa. This paper examines the validity of these popular views using a System-GMM methodology and panel data for African countries. The evidence suggests that aid, the...

This paper analyses the impact on the local economy of an emergency cash transfer programme in rural Malawi. The results are of interest given the growing use of cash transfers as development aid as well as the increasing popularity of such transfers as a form of social protection across...

Since the Uruguay Round, African countries have been concerned about the rules and operations of the multilateral trading system and are beginning to realize that they have to be active in the negotiation process to protect their interests. Consequently, several countries in the region have been...

In the past decades the involvement of local experts in the planning and evaluation of development projects has steadily increased. Ownership of development planning is propagated as major aim of bilateral and international development co-operation. Yet, the quality and performance of many local...

Can part of Africa’s current underdevelopment be explained by its slave trades? To explore this question, I use data from shipping records and historical documents reporting slave ethnicities to construct estimates of the number of slaves exported from each country during Africa’s slave...

This paper investigates the effect of foreign presence on the productivity of manufacturing industries in Ghana, using firm level panel data. We examine both labor and total factor productivity (TFP), which we compute using the Levinsohn and Petrin (2003) methodology. We control for a number of...

This paper uses 1998 household level data from urban Malawi to look at the impact on consumption patterns of the share of total household income accruing to different individuals within the household. Specifically, male and female income shares and other factors which may influence...