European Enlightenment thinkers were right in stressing the political dimension of inequality, rather than referring to "natural differences" as some others did after them in the 19th or 20th centuries. Drawing from recent theoretical and empirical contributions in social sciences and in...

1. Lebanon has one of the highest public debt stocks (relative to GDP) in the world, currently at over 185 percent of 2003 GDP. Economic policy continues to be dominated by chronic imbalances in government finances which have seen the budget deficit average over 17 percent of GDP over the past...

I propose a personal reading of some theories of social justice at a moment when the issue of equality or equity appears to be back on the ‘development agenda’. Nowadays the term equity tends to be most often associated with the equality of opportunity principle. After having briefly...

(english) The classical and more recent theories on development all fail to explain Madagascar’s long-running economic underperformance. This paper proposes a reinterpretation of Malagasy history based on the analytical framework of political economy. Our analyses point to the fact that,...

(english) This paper is an attempt to assess the relevance of the use of the North, Wallis and Weingast (2009) framework to explain the performances of Burkina Faso in terms of economic growth and development. The political history of Burkina Faso has been very unstable until president Campaoré...

In this paper, we evaluate four explanations for economic stagnation that have been proposed in the literature: coordination failures, ineffective mix of occupational choices, insufficient human capital accumulation, and politico-economic considerations. We calibrate models that embody these...

This paper presents empirical evidence regarding the effect of simultaneous antitrust and trade policy on productivity. We find that treating antitrust across countries as an exogenous policy overestimates the impact of competition on productivity by as much as 18%.

(english) This last decade has seen the emergence of a new field of research in development economics: randomised control trials. This paper explores the contrast between the (many) limitations and (very narrow) real scope of these methods and their success in sheer number and media coverage....