In the 1960s and 1970s elite studies formed an integral part of the research agenda on newly independent African states. Commentators sought to predict the likely political and economic paths of independent African states based on the social backgrounds and political orientations of existing...

There is growing recognition in the economics literature that African countries are characterized by very large economic disparities across subnational regions. Yet the lack of systematic and reliable empirical data at subnational levels of aggregation has made it difficult to explore possible...

Until the 1990s Kenya had a selective state-financed university system where students bore few educational costs. This limited the number of university students that the government could afford to educate and created fierce competition for university places. In the late 1990s the Kenyan...

Can name analysis be used to study elite persistence in African contexts? Taking Sierra Leone as a case study, we use surnames to measure how two historical elites (descendants of settlers that comprise Sierra Leone's Krio community and members of Chiefly Ruling Houses) have fared over the...

There has long been an emphasis on the importance of decentralization in providing better quality public services in the developing world. In order to assess the effectiveness of decentralization I examine here the case study of Uganda, which has seen major decentralization of power over the...

Does the leader's ethnicity affect the regional distribution of basic services such as education in Africa? Several influential studies have argued in the affirmative, by using educational attainment levels to show that children who share the ethnicity of the president during their school-aged...