In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) the informal sector is a major engine for employment, entrepreneurship and growth. The high incidence of corruption is another distinctive feature of SSA. According to the last Transparency International Corruption Perception Index almost 70% of SSA countries ranked...

The consequences on international trade of country breaks-up have received an increasing attention. This paper investigates the effect of independence on bilateral trade of former French colonies with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. Thanks to an original dataset including data on pre-independence...

The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect on North South trade of the quality of governance in developing countries by applying a gravity trade model. I test the model for a sample of 21 OECD countries and 95 developing countries over the period 1984-1997. A panel data analysis is used...

The consequences on international trade of colonial rule have received an increasing attention. This paper investigates the effect of independence on trade with a focus on former French colonies. Thanks to an original dataset including data on pre-independence bilateral trade for former French...

The European Union enforced respect of human rights and democratic principles an essential elements of all its preferential and non preferential trading agreements since the beginning of the 90's. In all EU external agreements, an essential element would imply that the EU can impose sanctions...

Who are the most prone to pay bribes? Who are angled for bribes? Who pay? This article explores these issues in sub-Saharan Africa, an area of the world where corruption is widespread. This paper empirical basis is a rich collection of comparable data provided by the Afrobarometer surveys...

The fact that crossing a political border dramatically reduces trade flows has been widely documented in the literature. The increasing number of borders has surprisingly attracted much less attention. The number of independent countries has indeed risen from 72 in 1948 to 192 today. This paper...

This paper analyzes the impact of corruption on the extent of trust in political institutions using a rich collection of comparable data provided by the Afrobarometer surveys conducted in 18 sub-Saharan African countries. More specifically, we set out to test the “efficient grease”...