Over the last two decades, millet prices in Niger have enjoyed periods of spectacular increase during which they seem to go well above their fundamental value. These episodes of price bursts followed by rapid reversals could be attributed to the presence of rational speculative bubbles....

The aim of this paper is to estimate the impact of weather related income shocks on child health in rural Burkina Faso where rain fed agriculture is the dominant production system. We combine health data originating from the 2008 household survey with meteorological data to define shocks at the...

La Banque Africaine de développement répartit son aide au développement entre pays selon une formule qui repose principalement sur la qualité de la politique économique et de la gouvernance des pays bénéficiaires. L’objet de ce rapport est d’examiner comment faire évoluer la formule...

The aim of this paper is to examine the main reasons how aid can contribute to poverty reduction, the channels through which it can do so and the lessons of the literature on these issues, with a special focus on the way aid can address the vulnerability faced by many developing countries.

State fragility is a concept that emerged among the international community of donors in order to adapt aid policies to particularly difficult situations. Fragility has thus been measured to design a special treatment in favour of fragile states, otherwise left behind. In this context, but...

This paper gives a conceptual overview of the openness and vulnerability, sharing which in both cases respectively depends on economic policy and on structural factors, independent from policy. It focuses on openness policy, proposed to be measured by the residual of an openness function...

Convergence has been much less studied with regards to human development than it has been done in economic growth models. However, since the evolution of human development indicators is bounded, the analyse of their convergence may be importantly biased. This paper investigates the question of...

This paper argues that, for a given average level of income per capita, the real currency depreciation has a negative impact on child survival, due to higher relative prices of tradable goods such as food and drug. This assumption is significantly tested from a dynamic panel model covering about...

In this paper we consider the link often alleged between ethnic diversity and the growth rate of GDP per capita. We first assume that it is ethnic polarization rather than ethnic fragmentation that is harmful for growth so that the relationship may be non-linear. Second, we hypothesize that the...

This paper, relying on the results of several cross-sectionnal growth regressions, examines the factors determining the sustainability of policy reforms and growth in Africa. Five structural factors are considered as determinants of policy: 1) ethno-linguistic fragmentation, which influences...