As access to foreign resources has becomeincreasingly difficult, in the wake of the globalfinancial crisis, the use of domestic resourcesfor development purposes is becoming moreand more important. Ironically, however, thereare possibilities of the financial crisis also affectingthe mobilization...

This paper reviews trade policy reform and performance in Africa since the 1980s. African countries have implemented significant trade liberalisation in this period, in particular reducing tariffs. This has usually resulted in an increase in imports, but export growth has often been sluggish so...

The African Development Bank allocates itsconcessional resources through a procedurewhich is mainly based on the quality of thebeneficiary countries’ economic policy andgovernance. This allocation procedure reliesmainly on the Performance-Based Allocationformula which can be criticized on two...

Except for the last 10 years, Africa had endurednearly 25 years of slow growth. The global financialcrisis, and its attendant global recession, iscertainly not welcome news. Commodity priceshave fallen, foreign investment has declined,development assistance is under pressure andremittances have...

The term Privatization is often loosely used to mean a number of related activities, including any expansion of the scope of private sector activity in an economy and the adoption by the public sector of efficiency enhancing techniques commonly employed by the private sector. While acknowledging...

In most African countries women tend to account for an average 51% of the population, andmake up about 65% of the rural labour force. Thus, many rural based micro-finance programmeshave attempted to address the women specific need for micro-credit. This paper analyses theeffectiveness of...

This paper proposes a multidimensional test for a partial ordering over absolute and relative pro-poor judgements. It also investigates whether poverty comparisons can be made over classes of indices that incorporate both absolute and relative poverty standards. Besides being robust to whether...

Sub-Saharan-Africa is considered the fastest-growing oil-producing region worldwide.Production has risen by 36 percent in the past ten years (as against 16 percentworldwide). Within 2005 alone, the revenue of the eight largest oil countries of sub-Saharan Africa will be about US$35 billion. The...

Based on the methodology of Ravallionand Chen (2003), Kakwani and Pernia(2000) and Kakwani, Khandker and Son(2003) and using household survey data,we analyze poverty, inequality and pro-poorchanges in South Africa over the period1995-2005 and in Mauritius over theperiod 2001-2006. Conditions are...