Benin is a small, slow-growing economy whose development relies on two sources of rent that are controlled by self-centred elites: cotton export and illegal cross-border trade with Nigeria. Patrimonialism governs Beninese society as a forceful struggle for political power takes place between the...

This paper proposes Bayesian estimates for welfare effects of consumption fluctuations and growth. Annual data from 82 developed and developing countries indicate a large degree of uncertainty as regards point estimates. Moreover, the comparison between the welfare gain from consumption...

This paper employs the standard gravity model to identify the quality of governance of China's African trade partners. As a benchmark, we perform the same analysis on other major African trade partners: France, Germany, UK, and USA. Data from 53 African countries in 1996--2009 show that only...

We employ bootstrap techniques in a production frontier framework to provide statistical inference for each component in the decomposition of labor productivity growth, which has essentially been ignored in this literature. We show that only two of the four components (efficiency changes and...

The inability of Benin to comply with EU standards led to a ban on its shrimp exports. We show that the ban had a negative impact on the income of fishmongers and fishermen, in the short run, but also several years after it was lifted. The impact persisted because exports to the EU did not...